Copy a table from a PDF without the columns collapsing

The 2-minute route that always keeps the columns

1. Drop the PDF on the converter above.
2. In Pages, type the page the table is on, such as 7. Only that page is read.
3. Click Convert to Excel and open the .xlsx.
4. Select the table’s cells and copy them. Paste wherever you need them: another workbook, Google Sheets, an email. Copying from a spreadsheet carries the columns along.

The surrounding text of the page (title, notes) comes along in rows of its own; ignore it and copy only the grid.

Why a pasted table collapses

A PDF does not contain a table object. It contains instructions like “draw 64,50 at this position” and “draw 129,00 at that position”. A table is what your eye makes of text that happens to line up. When you copy, the viewer gives the clipboard the text in the order the file stores it, usually row by row, with a space where there was a gap and a line break where a line ended. How wide the gap was, which is the only thing that made it a column, is lost.

We put an invented invoice through PDF to Text, which reads with the same engine Chrome uses to show PDFs, to see what a copy contains. The line items came out like this:

Pos Description Qty Unit price Amount EUR
02 Business cards, 500 pieces 2 64,50 129,00
04 Colour proofs on 2 paper 1 96,50 96,50
stocks, matte and gloss

Paste that into Excel and every line goes into 1 cell of column A. Splitting it on spaces does not help much. We ran Text to Columns on those lines in Excel set to English: “Business cards, 500 pieces” is 4 words, so the row spread over 8 cells, “Unit price” in the heading became 2 cells, the amounts 64,50 and 129,00 stayed text that does not add up, and the position number 02 became the number 2. The description that wrapped onto a second line became a row of its own.

What each route gives you

The same 4-item invoice, 3 ways:

With column lines drawn, the Excel conversion gave Pos, Description, Qty, Unit price and Amount in 5 columns. Without them, the position number and the description shared 1 cell, because a text block above the table crossed the gap between them; the amounts were still numbers in their own column. The wrong columns guide has the fix. The converter writes the number 64.5 into the file, whatever language your Excel is set to, which is why it beats splitting pasted text.

When plain paste is good enough

Paste and split works when every cell is a single word or a number, for example a list of codes and quantities:

1. Copy the rows in your PDF viewer and paste them into column A in Excel.
2. Select column A, then Data, Text to Columns, choose Delimited, tick Space, then Finish (the steps follow Microsoft’s help “Split text into different columns with the Convert Text to Columns Wizard”, checked on 11 October 2026).
3. In Google Sheets the same step is Data, Split text to columns (Google’s help, checked on 11 October 2026).

For 5 rows, this is faster than any converter. For 50 rows, or any column with multi-word text, convert.

Pasting a table into Word

A table pasted into Word arrives as lines of text, the same as in Excel. To get a real Word table, convert instead:

On our test invoice, PDF to Word found the line items and wrote them as 1 Word table with 5 columns and 5 rows, with or without the column lines in the PDF. Copy that table into your own document. Amounts stay as printed (64,50), which is what you want in a letter; for sums, use the Excel route.

The honest part

The convert route keeps the grid, not the look: colours, fonts, cell borders and merged-cell styling are not copied. Cells that span several columns, and descriptions that wrap onto 2 lines, can land in the wrong cell or a row of their own; check those. A scanned table has no text, so neither copying nor converting gets anything: run OCR PDF first, then convert (Scanned PDF to searchable explains why). And a PDF whose owner blocked copying can stop the copy route entirely; A PDF will not let you print or copy explains that restriction and when it is yours to lift.