Why use SnapFetch
- Detects and extracts real table structure, not just raw text
- Each table becomes its own sheet in the workbook
- Falls back to a plain text dump if no tables are found, so you still get something usable
How it works
- 1
Choose or drag in a PDF file
- 2
We detect and extract every table on every page
- 3
Download your XLSX workbook
- 4
Files are deleted from our servers after 1 hour
When to use PDF to Excel
Best for PDFs that contain real tabular data - invoices, statements, exported reports - where you want the numbers back in cells instead of retyping them. Table detection works from the text layout in the file, so ruled tables with consistent columns convert cleanest. Free-form text laid out in columns is not a table and will not convert into one.
Specifications & limits
- Output format
- XLSX (Microsoft Excel 2007 and later)
- Accepted input
- PDF only (.pdf)
- Scanned PDFs
- Not supported - table detection needs a real text layer, not an image
- Maximum pages
- 50 pages per PDF
- Maximum file size
- 20 MB per upload
- File retention
- Deleted from our servers 1 hour after upload
Troubleshooting
The spreadsheet is empty or nearly empty
No table structure was detected. This usually means the PDF is a scan, or the data is laid out with spaces rather than as a real table.
Columns are merged or split in the wrong places
Detection uses column alignment. Tables without ruling lines and with ragged alignment are the hardest case - expect some manual fixing.
The upload is rejected before anything happens
The file is over the 20 MB cap. Compress it first, or split a long PDF into smaller files and process them separately.
References
The published specification for the formats involved, and the open-source software that actually performs this conversion.
- pypdf documentation
The library used for PDF page operations - splitting, merging, rotation and encryption.
Frequently asked questions
You'll still get a workbook with the extracted text, one line per row - just without the table structure, since there isn't one to detect.