Getting a table out of a PDF
A PDF has no tables in it. What it has is text placed at coordinates, and sometimes lines drawn around that text. A table is something you see when you look at the page. Any tool that claims to "read the tables" is guessing — the only honest question is how good the guess is, and this tool tells you.
Two ways to guess
Ruled detection uses the borders the producer actually drew. The horizontal and vertical rules are clustered into a grid and every word is dropped into the cell it falls in. When a document has borders this is close to exact, which is why these results are reported at high confidence.
Whitespace detection is for the majority of real documents, which have no borders at all. The page is swept for vertical gaps that stay blank across many consecutive lines; those gutters become the column boundaries. It works well on financial statements, price lists and reports, and it can be fooled by a two-column paragraph.
Leave the method on Auto and both passes run; the stronger, non-overlapping results are kept.
Tuning the result
- Minimum rows and columns filter out noise. A two-row, two-column "table" is very often a heading and a date.
- Pages accepts
all,1-3, or2,5,9. Scanning one page of a 400-page report is much faster than scanning all of it. - Every detected table can be deleted before export. Detection is a heuristic; if it found a paragraph, remove it rather than cleaning up the spreadsheet afterwards.
Export
- One CSV per table, or all of them zipped together.
- One combined CSV, with a marker row between tables so the boundaries survive.
- One XLSX with one worksheet per table, ready to open in Excel, LibreOffice, Numbers or Google Sheets. Cells that are plain numbers are written as numbers so they sum correctly; anything that merely looks numeric, such as an invoice code with a leading zero, stays text.
Every CSV carries a UTF-8 byte-order mark, so accented characters survive the trip into Excel on Windows.
Privacy
The PDF is opened, parsed and exported entirely inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and the tool makes no network requests while it works.
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