6 Ways to Convert PDF to Excel on Mac 2025: Pick Yours

PDF Converter OCR

Best PDF to Excel Converter for Mac 2025

Free Download macOS 10.14 or later

Struggling with data loss, formatting errors, or scanned PDFs when converting PDF to Excel on your Mac? This comprehensive guide solves these pain points with 6 best PDF to Excel converters, tool comparisons, and actionable tips to ensure excellent conversions.

Cisdem PDF Converter OCR

Best PDF to Excel Converter for Mac 2025

• Convert PDF to Excel without data loss and formatting mess.
• Support multiple inputs: convert native, scanned and encrypted PDF.
• Enable to combine all PDF pages into a single Excel sheet.
• Convert PDF to over 10 formats like Word, PPT, CSV, HTML, images, etc.
• Create PDF from multiple popular formats and merge inputs into one PDF.
• Provide OCR feature in 50+ languages.
• All conversions allow partial conversion and bulk processing.

Free Download macOS 10.14 or later

Convert PDF to Excel on Mac Offline: Data and Formatting Retained!

It is true that many users prefer online PDF to Excel converters in the beginning, but eventually, most of them turn to professional software on the desktop. The main reason is that the latter ones deliver high-quality and quick conversions.

Top 1. Cisdem PDF Converter OCR

Cisdem PDF Converter OCR ranks first because of its simple interface, ease of use, quick and accurate conversions.

This dedicated OCR tool specializes in converting PDF to various formats while preserving your original content perfectly. It supports all types of PDF inputs--regular PDF, scanned PDF and encrypted PDF.

You’ll appreciate its versatility: turn PDFs to editable Excel spreadsheets while retaining every number, table, and formatting detail from the source. No manual copying or tedious reformatting needed. Need even more control? Select specific pages, process hundreds of files at once, or merge multi-page PDFs into a single, perfectly formatted Excel sheet—all in a few clicks.

How to Convert PDF to Excel on Mac?

1. Free download and install PDF Converter OCR to your Mac.
   Free Download macOS 10.14 or later
2. Launch the program, drop your PDF files to the Converter interface on Mac.
3. Download the OCR module for the first time if the uploaded files include images or scanned PDFs.
4. Choose the page range you want to convert to Excel and select the output format as "to XLSX".
5. Click on the Gear icon and make adjustments to the converted Excel file.
6. Select a folder to save the output files. Then, click Convert to export PDF to Excel on Mac. The green check mark indicates a successful conversion.

Also, you can check the video tutorial to convert PDF to Excel on Mac with Cisdem.

Top 2. Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat Pro is a powerful tool to manage PDFs, in which you can view, create, export, sign, redact PDF, etc. With its feature of "Export PDF", users will be allowed to convert PDF to Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Image and even HTML.

How to convert PDF to Excel on Mac in Adobe Acrobat Pro?

1. Run Adobe Acrobat Pro on your Mac.
2. Go to Tools > Export PDF.
3. There are multiple exported formats you can choose from. Click Spreadsheet and choose one version of Excel.

4. Hit the Gear icon and adjust the settings about Excel.

5. Continue with OK to convert PDF to Excel on your Mac.

Top 3. Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet editor developed by Microsoft. Mac users can get it from Mac App Store or Microsoft website. While not a dedicated PDF converter, Excel lets you import your PDF data into spreadsheet directly. This method is suitable for native PDFs with clean tables, and fails with scanned or image-based PDFs.

How to Export PDF to Excel on Mac?

1. Open a new spreadsheet.
2. Go to Data > Get Data > From PDF.
3. Then choose the table you need to insert, and click on the Load button to export data from PDF.

Best PDF to Excel Converters Online

Also, there are lots of free online PDF to Excel converters for your choice. Here we pick 3 of them that bring good conversion quality, but before visiting these tools, you should be aware of the following:

• Make sure your Internet connection is in good condition.
• Don't upload large size files for conversion, the process may take longer time, even pause for no reason.
• Don't upload complicated files for conversion, the conversion quality will be greatly sacrificed when your PDF files are filled with tables, images, etc.
• Don't upload private files for conversion, your files are stored in the online server for a while, which may cause information leakage.

#1. Online2PDF

This online PDF to Excel converter is listed here mainly due to its good conversion quality. You will find that all the data is formatted well in separate rows and columns.

Besides, it allows you to upload multiple PDF files up to 30 files, not exceeding 200 MB in total. After uploading, you can convert both native and scanned PDF files to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, RTF and TXT on Mac for free.

Steps to Convert PDF to Excel on Mac Online Free

1. Go to online2pdf.com, upload PDF files that you want to convert to Excel on Mac.
2. Choose output as Excel and select OCR if you have uploaded a scanned file.
3. Also, you can merge all imported files into a spreadsheet file as you like.
4. Click Convert to turn PDF to Excel online. After the conversion is completed, the download of Excel output will start automatically. Just save it to the preferred path on your Mac.

When running this online converter, we’ve encountered these issues:

• When we deselect the Advanced OCR feature, the tables are perfectly remained and formatted in the Excel spreadsheet, but the images are lost.
• When we select the Advanced OCR feature, the content other than tables are displayed in disorder.

#2. PDFtoExcel

It ranks as my second best online free choice due to its satisfying conversion quality. By saying “Satisfying”, I mean PDFtoExcel does bring better results than other similar online PDF converters, but in terms of format and layout integrity, users still need to adjust manually after conversion.

PDFtoExcel is specifically designed for converting native and scanned PDF to Excel. You can upload PDF files from Mac, Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive

How to Convert PDF to Excel on Mac Free Online?

1. Go to https://www.pdftoexcel.com/.
2. Click Upload or directly drag and drop a file to import PDF into the program without signing up.
3. The conversion will start automatically, once ready, a Download File button will be available, click it to get your Excel output.

When running this online converter, we’ve encountered these issues:

• It sometimes showed a failure after a long time of analyzing the imported file, while sometimes it can convert the same PDF into Excel successfully again.
• The images in the original PDF will not be retained in the converted Excel file. You have to add them to your Excel document by yourself.

#3. PDF2Go

PDF2Go is actually a versatile PDF toolkit that allows users to edit, convert, compress, protect and unlock PDF files. It supports transforming PDF to 5 output formats, including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, text and JPG.

For users who haven’t logged in, it will give you 16 credits for free. During the conversion, one coin will be consumed every 30 seconds. But processing more than 3 files in a single task is only available for Premium users.

Few Steps to Convert PDF to Excel on Mac

1. Search PDF2Go website in a browser.
2. Drag and drop up to 3 PDF files into the upload zone.
3. Scroll down the page to adjust the conversion settings. It offers the OCR functionality.
4. Click Start button to begin the PDF-to-Excel conversion.
5. You can download the converted Excel files one by one or as a zip.

When running this online converter, we’ve encountered these issues:

• It takes a long time to upload and convert the imported PDF files, in our test, it still shows that the conversion is in the process even after 10 minutes. We have to refresh the page, upload and convert the files again.
• Compared with the previous two online converters, the conversion effect of this one is a bit poor. The table format is somewhat distorted, and all the blank cells in the spreadsheet are outlined with black dashed lines. There is no way to remove these lines.

Testing Results: Online vs Offline Converters

When testing the PDF-to-Excel converters, we’ve used 4 PDF files:

one file only contains a short and simple table, two files contain a long and relatively complex table, one file includes four tables and two graphs.

All of the above methods can produce decent conversion results when dealing with simple tables. However, when we are working on complicated PDF files, online tools are prone to get misformatted or lose information after conversion.

Part of the Original PDF:

Converted File:

Comparison at a glance:

The reasons why we need to convert PDF to Excel can be various, check them below:

• Make Data Analysis Easier and More Organized: Excel is initially designed for storing and manipulating large amounts of information at once. You can utilize features like filter, sort and other various calculations on your data, which are not available in PDF format.
• Bring Convenience to Edit Content and Collaborative Work: It often occurs that the tables and charts included in your PDF require a regular update. But PDF is a static format, slightly cumbersome to edit without a handy editor. Thus, converting it to an Excel file will make the process easier. On top of that, Excel files can be shared and accessed among team members simply, which is conducive to collaborative work.

2. Does Mac Preview Have a Function to Convert PDF to Excel?

Preview is the native application on Mac. It can view, edit, annotate, print and convert PDF files. The exported file formats Preview supports include HEIC, JPEG, OpenEXR, PNG, TIFF and PDF. If you want to convert PDF to Excel with Preview, then you have to manually copy the data from a PDF and paste it to an Excel spreadsheet.

This method is not workable for scanned PDFs and consumes much time reformatting the table. If you mind, you can use the above methods.

3. Tips to Prevent Data Loss and Formatting Issues

The most likely potential problems when converting a PDF to an Excel file are data loss and formatting issues. In order to avoid such situations as much as possible, the tips and tricks listed here can help a lot.

• First of all, start with a high-quality PDF file if possible. A complicated PDF file, such as those with sophisticated layouts, multiple tables, or embedded images, may not convert cleanly. Besides, make sure that the images and texts contained in the PDF are high-resolution, if not, they will also fail to be recognized in the converted file.
• In the second place, choose a powerful PDF to Excel converter. Using different conversion tools for the same original file will lead to various conversion results. A high-performance PDF converter offline usually yields better results compared to online services. More importantly, some converter software even has the OCR capabilities, doing a good job on scanned files.
• The last but not least, check and revise the mistakes inside the converted file. As a matter of fact, no converter can guarantee 100% accuracy of conversion result, and there will inevitably be some small errors. Hence, you’d better review the file and manually correct them.

Conclusion

In most cases, we seek free or low-cost solutions to perform document conversion, but only to find dedicated tools get the best results in the most efficient way. This is also true when we are trying to convert PDF to Excel on mac.

According to above tests, free solutions do really help when you are not working on complicated PDF files. But if you want to retain the original file quality and look for a better user experience, you’d better try a professional PDF to Excel converter like Cisdem PDF OCR Converter, it is worth a try.
Free Download macOS 10.14 or later