Extract Tables from a PDF to Excel or Google Sheets

Copy-pasting a table out of a PDF gives you soup. Real extraction reconstructs rows and columns from the page's text geometry.

How table detection works

Digital PDFs store every text fragment with coordinates. Kameleo clusters fragments that share a baseline into rows, finds persistent horizontal gaps to derive columns, and rebuilds the grid — all in your browser. The result exports as CSV that Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets open natively.

Scanned tables need OCR first

A scan has no text coordinates — it's a photo. Run Kameleo's OCR tool first to give the document a text layer, then extract. Accuracy depends on scan quality; 300 DPI originals work best.

Cleanup tips

Merged header cells and multi-line cells are the usual suspects for misalignment. Extract page by page rather than all-at-once when a document mixes layouts, and give exported columns a quick sanity check against the original before analysis.