A PDF full of numbers is easy to read but painful to actually work with -- you can't sort it, sum it, or drop it into a spreadsheet without retyping it. Here's how to get a PDF's tables into Excel without doing that by hand, and which tool to reach for depending on what you actually need.
Scanquil has two ways to get a PDF into a spreadsheet, and they answer different questions. PDF to Excel converts the whole document, one sheet per page, with prose and tables kept in the order they actually appear -- use this when you want the full page.
Extract Tables does the opposite: it ignores everything except the tables themselves, pulling only the detected table blocks into a workbook -- one sheet per table, wherever it lands in the document. Use this when the surrounding text doesn't matter and you just want the numbers.
For a PDF with a real text layer, Scanquil works out table structure geometrically -- looking at the gaps between words to infer where one column ends and the next begins, then checking whether those gaps line up consistently down the page like a real grid.
For a scanned page, the same analysis runs after OCR reads the text. The hardest cases for any table-reading engine, free or paid, are the predictable ones: tables with no visible border lines, merged cells, or a skewed scan where columns no longer line up in straight vertical bands.
Choose your PDF in Extract Tables (or PDF to Excel, if you want the full page), and Scanquil finds and reads every table on-device. Download the result as a real .xlsx -- sortable, editable, ready to work with.
A skewed scan, a low-quality photo of a printed table, or a table with merged header cells is a genuinely harder read. Extract Tables (AI) handles the scanned pages in that situation with a different engine tuned for exactly this, still returning a real grid rather than flattened text.
No. The free tools read your file entirely in your browser, on your own device -- it never leaves your computer.
Extract Tables gives each table its own sheet in the downloaded workbook, in the order they appear in the document.
Merged cells are the hardest case for any table-reading engine. Scanquil places the cell's text at its top-left position; cells it spans over may come through blank rather than perfectly replicated.
Yes -- it works in any modern browser on a phone, tablet, or desktop, with no app to install.