"My PDF is a scanned document, not a digital PDF. Will this work?"
Yes! That's exactly why I built the OCR feature. Toggle on "OCR for scanned PDFs" in Advanced Options. The tool will read the text from the images and convert it to Excel. It works best with clean scans (300 DPI or higher). For blurry scans, try the "High" OCR quality setting.
"The PDF has multiple tables on one page. Will it detect them all?"
Absolutely. Our table detection algorithm finds every table on the page, even if they're side by side or nested. Each table becomes a separate sheet in Excel (if you enable "Multiple sheets" option) or you can choose to have them all on one sheet. The tool even preserves the spatial relationship between tables.
"The PDF is 100 pages. Will it handle that many pages?"
Yes, but with a caveat. Since everything happens in your browser, very large PDFs (100+ pages) might be slow on older computers. For best results, I recommend splitting large PDFs into smaller chunks (10-20 pages each) using our Split PDF tool. For most modern computers, 100 pages is fine—it might just take 30-60 seconds.
"Does it work with password-protected PDFs?"
If you know the password, yes. When you upload a protected PDF, the tool will prompt you for the password. The password is used locally in your browser and never sent anywhere. If you don't know the password, unfortunately we can't help—that's a security feature of PDFs, not a limitation of our tool.
"The numbers in my PDF have commas and dollar signs. Will they become actual numbers in Excel?"
Yes! Enable "Preserve number formatting" in Advanced Options. The tool detects currency symbols, commas, decimal points, and percentage signs. In Excel, these become actual number formats, not text. So you can sum columns, create formulas, and analyze data immediately without manual cleanup.
"The PDF has Arabic text. Will it work correctly?"
Absolutely. I made sure right-to-left languages work perfectly. Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu—all supported. The text direction is preserved, and the characters render correctly in Excel. Just make sure you have the appropriate fonts installed on your system.
"Is this really free? What's the catch?"
No catch. Seriously. I built this because I needed it, and I got tired of hitting "free trial" limits on other tools. There's no "pro" version coming next month. No watermarks. No registration. If you want to support us, just tell a colleague about it. That's literally it.
"The table in my PDF has colored rows. Will that transfer to Excel?"
Yes! Enable "Preserve formatting" and the tool will keep background colors, font colors, borders, and even conditional formatting if it was in the original PDF. Your Excel file will look exactly like your PDF—no more losing visual cues that help you read the data.