How to Convert PDF to Excel on Mac?

I totally get where you're coming from. It can be a real headache when the formatting goes haywire, and yeah, online converters can feel a bit iffy privacy-wise. Let's sort this out in a way that keeps your documents safe and your sanity intact.

Since you're on a Mac, you've got a couple of solid options that should make the PDF to Excel conversion smoother without throwing your data into the wild web.

• Adobe Acrobat Pro: This is like the Swiss Army knife for PDFs. Adobe Acrobat Pro has a built-in feature to export PDFs to different formats, including Excel. It's pretty straightforward: open your PDF with Acrobat, head over to the "Export PDF" tool, choose Excel as your export format, and voilà! The only catch is that it's a paid program, but if you're doing this often, it could be worth the investment for the ease and security it offers.

• Preview and Numbers: Since you're on a Mac, you can use Preview to open your PDF and then copy and paste the data into Numbers (Apple's version of Excel). After you've pasted the data into Numbers, you can do a bit of cleaning up if needed and then export the file to an Excel format. It's a bit more manual, but it's totally free and keeps your data off the internet.

• Look for dedicated Mac apps: The Mac App Store has several PDF conversion apps that promise secure conversions without uploading your files online. Look for apps with good reviews and clear privacy policies to ensure your data stays safe. Some apps might be free, while others could be paid, but they often offer more features or better support.

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a presentation format, an endpoint. You want the underlying data.

There is no general way to make the conversion -- it is NOT feasible.

if you were able to find ANY data by opening the file as you did, that is already remarkable, and far better than expected.

The way to convert that data is to obtain the data in a very rudimentary form such as Comma Separated Values (CSV) which Excel can trivially assemble into tables for you.

SusieGunther Said:

"How to Convert PDF to Excel on Mac?"

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Converting PDF to Exel on a Mac:

Print this and Use Text Recognition Software: Print it out, and scan it as a photo. Once scanned as a photo, drag-and-drop the signature into it. Then, print it as a PDF document. Another option would to user text recognition software. With it, you could create a MS Word Document, and it would become editable. So, consider use such software as OmniPage.

Yes, you can print out the pdf and scan it and apply Optical Character Recognition. That is technically possible. But that method in general is convoluted, torturous, and error prone. I would never recommend that method except in desperation.

Grant Bennet-Alder Said:

“I would never recommend that method except in desperation.”

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Border the Spreadsheets Tables Cells:

Convoluted, thought it may seem, pretty much seems the way the OP has to go from here. But, to make it even more easier for the OP, print out the spreadsheets with each cell of a table outlined, and things would go much quicker for certain OmniPage.