A PDF does not actually contain tables. It contains bits of text placed at coordinates, and lines drawn near them. A converter has to infer rows and columns from where those bits sit.
How the conversion works
PDF to Excel groups text into rows by vertical position and splits each row into cells by the gaps between words. Plain numbers become real numeric cells, so you can sum and sort them straight away, while codes with leading zeros such as 007 stay as text.
Excel or CSV?
Choose PDF to Excel for a spreadsheet you will open and edit. Choose PDF to CSV when the data is going into another system, a database import or a script.
What converts well
- Bank statements, invoices and reports exported from software convert cleanly.
- Tables with merged cells or text wrapped onto several lines may need tidying.
- Scanned tables need OCR PDF first, because a scan has no text to extract.