Convert

Every “PDF to Excel” button is a confident guess. This one shows its working.

A PDF records glyphs at coordinates. A table is only the observation that many of them start at the same few positions, line after line. So Oxofolio measures the page, puts the measurement on screen, and converts nothing until you have looked at it.

Runs offline · opens no sockets
The problem

Why this is worth a tool at all.

The schedule arrived as a PDF and the work has to happen in cells. The usual options are retyping it, or a converter that returns a spreadsheet with no indication of what it assumed — and the errors it makes are the quiet kind, discovered in month four by someone reconciling a total.

The worst of them is invisible: a converter that decides 007 is the number seven has destroyed an account reference, and the cell looks perfectly reasonable.

The check you can run yourself

Try it on a client's own bank statement. The grid appears on screen before a file is written, which is the part no competitor's button will show you.

Every claim on this page is about a mechanism rather than an outcome, so each one is something you can verify rather than something you have to believe.

How it works

How the inference is made, out loud.

The format is suggested, with its evidence The page geometry is measured and the signals behind the suggestion are shown next to it — not just a verdict. You can override it.
The grid is previewed before anything is written You see the columns it found, on the page, and press Convert only if they are right.
One piece of geometry, two consumers The preview and the conversion share the same code. A preview finding four columns and a conversion finding six would be worse than no preview at all.
Lines grouped by baseline Measured against the line's own height, not each glyph's. Three earlier versions got this wrong, and the symptom is worth quoting: measured per glyph, a full stop is three points tall, so every decimal point landed on a line of its own and 125000.50 was read as 12500050.
Conservative about what becomes a number 007 stays text. (1,240.75) stays negative money. Only ISO dates become real dates. A figure left as text is one click to fix in Excel; a reference number turned into an integer has lost its leading zeros for good.
The workbook says where it came from A Source sheet names the PDF and what was assumed. Six months later nobody remembers whether the spreadsheet on the shared drive was the bank's or something a tool inferred.
The boundaries

What it will not do.

  • What it gets wrong is stated before you start: a form, a two-column report and a scan with a poor OCR layer all look like tables to any geometry-based reader, including this one.
  • A page with no text layer is refused and routed to OCR rather than converted into a blank workbook.
  • PowerPoint is shown in the list and disabled, with the reason — because leaving it off would make the list look like a complete answer to “what can this become?”
Read the security pack

Why the limits are on the page

A tool that claims everything is a tool nobody can check. Each of these is a decision rather than a gap, and stating them here means the download contains exactly what this page described.

The same discipline runs through the security pack, where the unfavourable answers sit on the first page rather than the fourth.

Straight answers

What people ask about this.

Can it convert to Word as well?

Yes. The Word conversion rebuilds paragraphs, headings, bold and italic, tables, images, page size and margins. What it cannot reconstruct is listed rather than discovered: exact line breaks, hyphenation, columns of prose, footnotes and running heads.

Does it convert Word or Excel back to PDF?

No, and that is deliberate. The viewer can print its own reconstruction of a document, and the filename carries “(preview)” precisely because it is not a Word-to-PDF converter — a PDF of an engagement letter that paginates differently from the signed original is exactly the artefact you must not file by accident.

What happens to a scanned table?

It is refused rather than converted, and sent to OCR first. Below a character threshold the file is a picture of a table, and converting it would produce an empty workbook.

Is the file uploaded to be converted?

No. The measurement and the conversion both happen in a process on your machine that has no network access.

Next

The tools people use alongside it.

Offline OCR

Make a scan searchable without sending it anywhere.

Fourteen days, everything unlocked

Try it on your own files.

Download Oxofolio →