How to Copy a Table from a PDF or Web Page into Excel
You copy a table, paste it, and everything lands in one column. Here is how to get real columns.
Why it goes wrong. When you copy a table from a PDF, an email or a chat, the columns are separated by spaces, tabs or pipes that a spreadsheet does not always understand. Excel then puts each line into one cell.
What Text to Table does. Paste the text and the tool looks at the lines and finds the separator: tab, comma, semicolon, pipe, two or more spaces, a Markdown table, or key: value lines. It builds a table, uses the first line as the header and shows a preview. If it guessed wrong, choose the separator yourself.
Tips for PDFs. Text copied from a PDF usually has several spaces between columns, so Two or more spaces works best. A cell that has a single space inside, such as New York, stays together. Numbers with a leading zero, such as 01234, are kept as text so that zip codes and IDs do not change. Check the result before you rely on it, because PDFs can place text in odd orders.
When it is a picture. A scanned PDF or a screenshot is an image, not text, so there is nothing to copy. Use Screenshot to Data, which reads the table with OCR in your browser. Both tools run on your device, so nothing is uploaded.
Related tool pages
- Paste Text into a Table for Excel: Turn text you copied from a web page, PDF or email into a table, then download it as Excel or CSV. Free, in your browser, nothing is uploaded.
- Convert Text to CSV: Convert plain text, tab or space separated lists and key: value lines into a CSV file. Free, in your browser, and nothing is uploaded.
- Markdown Table to CSV: Convert a Markdown table to CSV or Excel. Paste the table with its pipes and dashes and get a clean table. Free, in your browser, nothing uploaded.
- Copy a PDF Table into Excel: Copied a table from a PDF? Paste the text and get a clean table you can download as Excel or CSV. Free, in your browser, and nothing is uploaded.
How to use the Text to Table: step by step
- Open Text to Table.
- Paste your text.
- Check the columns and change the separator if needed.
- Download Excel or CSV.
When to use the Text to Table
- Turn a PDF table into Excel
- Convert a Markdown table to CSV
- Clean up a table copied from a chat
- Make a table from key: value lines
Example
Input: Name Plan Price (spaces)
Output: a table with 3 columns
Frequently asked questions
What kinds of text can I paste?
Tab, comma, semicolon, pipe or space separated text, Markdown tables, and key: value lines. The separator is detected for you and you can change it.
Is my text uploaded?
No. The text is turned into a table in your browser and is never sent anywhere.
What text can Text to Table read?
Tab, comma, semicolon, pipe and space separated text, Markdown tables, and report-style text. Blocks of Key: value lines separated by blank lines become one row each, and sentences such as "Order #1001 was placed on 2026-10-20 by customer Rahul. Product: Laptop. Status: Delivered." become rows with columns for the repeated parts. The layout is found automatically, and you can pick it yourself if the columns look wrong. If the text mixes several layouts, the tool tells you instead of making a table that could be wrong.
Why does Text to Table say the text mixes layouts?
It only builds a table when the lines or blocks look alike. A paste that contains a log line, a JSON line, a sentence and a Key: value block together has no single set of columns, and any table made from it would be a guess. Paste one layout at a time, or choose the layout yourself in the list.
Tip: If two columns merge into one, try a different separator. Spaces inside a value are only a problem in space-separated text.