A scanned PDF contains images of a document. OCR recognizes characters in those images so they can be organized into spreadsheet rows and columns. GetPDFMint's PDF to Excel converter includes English OCR for supported scanned pages.
How to convert scanned PDF to Excel
- Open PDF to Excel and select your PDF.
- Enter the pages you want to convert, or leave the page field blank to use all pages within the selection limit.
- Keep Read scanned pages with English OCR enabled. Start with Automatic table detection.
- Select Convert to Excel. Inspect the worksheet previews and any OCR notes.
- Download Excel and compare the complete workbook with the original scan.
Choose the right table detection mode
Automatic is a starting point. Tables with borders is intended for tables separated by visible rules. Borderless columns can help with data arranged into aligned text columns. Review the resulting rows and columns; a detection mode does not guarantee that a complex layout will become a correct table.
What are the file and OCR limits?
- One PDF upload, up to 25 MB and 200 source pages.
- Up to 50 selected pages per conversion.
- English OCR for at most 10 scanned pages in the selection.
- Password-protected files must be unlocked first. Complex documents can also reach processing limits.
What will the Excel workbook contain?
Each detected table gets a separate worksheet. A Summary sheet identifies source pages and review notes. If a reliable table is not found, readable text can be exported as lines for manual organization. Other readable page text is kept in Notes sheets. Detected table structure, merges and basic styles are retained when available, especially for PDFs with selectable text and clear borders. Layout is approximate; images, charts, original fonts and formulas are not recreated.
Check numbers, IDs and dates carefully
OCR can confuse characters such as O and 0 or I and 1. Compare totals, decimal points, minus signs and account or reference numbers against the scan. Clear numbers and percentages can become numeric cells; leading-zero IDs, long identifiers, dates and ambiguous formats remain text. Disable Convert clear numbers to numeric cells if you want extracted values kept as text.
Why is the preview shorter than the workbook?
The preview shows up to 20 rows and 12 columns from each of the first 20 data worksheets, and shortens long cells. The XLSX download contains the complete extracted rows and the Summary sheet. Review the downloaded workbook before using its values.
Which scans work best?
Clear, upright printed English text is the best starting point for this tool. Handwriting, other languages, tilted or blurred scans and pages mixing images with selectable text may produce incomplete or inaccurate results. If you need editable paragraphs rather than a spreadsheet, use Scanned PDF to Word. For selectable text without tables, consider PDF to Text.
The conversion runs on the server. Review the tool's file-handling information and the privacy policy before uploading documents.