[Latest] Adobe PDF to Excel: A Step-by-Step Conversion Guide With/Without Adobe

When an Adobe PDF contains table format data, you may want to convert it to Excel format for easy data manipulation and analysis. There are many tools that can help to convert Adobe PDF to Excel. However, this guide will emphasize how to perform the conversion using Adobe Acrobat Pro. Besides that, the guide will also talk about its alternative, desktop-based tool to convert Adobe PDF to Excel XLS. So, let's get started.

Part 1. Things You Should Know About Converting PDF to Excel with Adobe

PDF and Excel XLS are two different file formats and require reshaping the content to adjust with the format layout. Therefore, when you are converting PDF to Excel with Adobe, you need to keep a few things in mind.

1. Is Adobe PDF to Excel Converter Free?

No, Adobe PDF to Excel converter is not free. You have to subscribe to either Adobe Standard (22.99/month) or Adobe Pro (29.99/month). Once subscribed, you can use the Adobe PDF to XLS converter.

In contrast, UPDF is another PDF to Excel converter tool that offers the same set of features. However, its premium plan costs just $29.99/year compared to the $22.99/month ($239.88/year) of Adobe. So, download UPDF if you want to use a more cost-friendly tool to convert Adobe PDF to Excel.

2. Will it lose formatting after converting PDF to Excel with Adobe?

It mainly depends on the quality and complexity of the PDF file. If the PDF contains clear data, then Adobe Acrobat will be able to preserve the formatting, including font, tables, images, colors, etc. However, if the PDF contains complex formatting, then the conversion may not be able to preserve the formatting.

Part 2. How to Convert PDF to Excel with Adobe

The process of converting PDF to Excel with Adobe is straightforward. However, if you are looking for an efficient and cost-effective way for batch conversion without dealing with formatting issues, try UPDF.

Let's now discuss the two methods to convert Adobe PDF to Excel:

Method #1: Convert PDF to Excel with Adobe Acrobat Pro

If you have a subscription to Adobe Acrobat Pro, you can use the conversion feature to convert Adobe PDF to XLS. Follow the below steps to perform the conversion:

1. Launch Adobe Acrobat Pro and open the PDF you want to convert.
2. Click the "Export PDF" option from the right sidebar.
3. Select "Spreadsheet" as the export format and choose "Microsoft Excel Workbook".
4. Click "Export" to initiate the conversion process. If your PDF has some scanned text, Adobe Acrobat will perform OCR (text recognition) automatically.
5. Name the converted Excel file and click "Save".

This way, you can easily convert Adobe PDF to Excel with Acrobat Pro. Although the steps look straightforward, below are a few pros and cons you need to know about this method:

In short, Adobe Acrobat Pro is a useful tool to convert Adobe PDF to Excel, but the above cons can hinder the experience and impact its reliability in complex conversion requirements.

Method #2: Convert PDF to Excel for Free with Adobe's Online Converter

Adobe also offers an online converter tool with which you can easily convert PDF to XLS online without installing any software. All it requires is uploading the PDF file, initiating the conversion, and downloading the converted XLS file.

Follow the below steps to learn how Adobe converts PDF to Excel online:

1. Go to the Adobe online conversion website and click "Select File" to upload the PDF file you want to convert.

2. Click "Convert to XLSX" to initiate the conversion.

3. Once the conversion is completed, click "Open in Excel" or the 3-dots menu button > Download this file.

This way, you can easily convert Adobe PDF to Excel online. However, it comes with a few pros and cons, as follows:

Overall, the Adobe convert PDF to Excel online approach is useful if you just want to convert a single and simple PDF file to Excel. For complex PDFs or bulk conversion, you need to use a more powerful tool that can convert multiple PDFs instantly with high accuracy. The next part talks in detail about the alternative and powerful way.

Part 3. Convert PDF to Excel Without Adobe – The Best Alternative Way

By now, we have learned how to convert Adobe PDF to Excel from Adobe Acrobat Pro and Adobe online tools. However, the concerns of losing formatting, slow processing, costly plans, and chances of errors can hinder their usability.

To overcome this, there is a more powerful alternative that turns all the cons of Adobe PDF to XLS conversion into its features. The tool is known as UPDF.

UPDF is an AI-driven PDF converter and editor tool that can convert PDF to various file formats, including Excel. What sets it apart from Adobe is its super-fast and AI-powered features. It ensures that the conversion is performed with utmost accuracy to minimize formatting issues.

Below are the key reasons why UPDF is the better alternative to PDF to Excel conversion:

1. Efficient Conversion: It can efficiently convert PDF to Excel or 10+ file formats with AI-powered conversion for utmost accuracy.
2. Selective Page Conversion: It can convert all or selective PDF pages to Excel.
3. Click-Based Batch Conversion: It provides a click-based solution to convert multiple PDF files to Excel without the need to create any actions. You can even select the entire folder.
4. Powerful OCR Technology: It comes built-in with powerful OCR technology that can detect PDF content in various languages, including English, German, Korean, Japanese, etc.
5. Smooth Conversions of Large PDFs: It can smoothly convert large-sized PDFs with hundreds of pages without any errors.
6. Cost-Effective: It is cost-friendly compared to Adobe. You get access to the conversion feature for just $29.99/year compared to $239.88/year for Adobe; and UPDF is now on a big sale, allowing users to get UPDF Pro at $25.99 - grab the chance to get this limited-time offer!

Simply put, UPDF is a more advanced, modernized, and best alternative to Adobe for converting PDFs to Excel files. It also offers an intuitive, click-based interface to do the conversion. So, you must download UPDF and give it a test run to visualize its conversion accuracy yourself.

Follow the below steps to convert Adobe PDF to Excel with UPDF:

1. Steps to Convert a Single PDF to Excel

1. Launch UPDF and open the PDF you want to convert.
2. Click the "Export PDF" icon from the right sidebar and select "Excel".

3. Select the pages to convert and click "Export".

2. Steps to Batch Convert PDFs to Excel

1. Launch UPDF and click "Batch".
2. Choose the "Convert" option.

3. Click the "Add Files" button and select all the files you want to batch convert.

4. Define the output format as Excel and click "Apply".

3. Steps to Convert Scanned PDF to Excel

1. Launch UPDF and open the scanned PDF you want to convert.
2. Click the "OCR" icon from the right sidebar. Select the document type and specify the layout option. Once done, click "Perform OCR" to convert the scanned PDF into an editable PDF.

3. After OCR, click the "Export PDF" icon from the right sidebar and select "Excel".
4. Select the pages to convert and click "Export".

That's it! This way, UPDF incorporates all the conversion options you need to convert any PDF to Excel. Besides that, UPDF has a lot more to offer.

As mentioned earlier, UPDF is also a "PDF editor" tool, which means that you get to taste a lot of PDF editing features. Below is a quick glimpse of what else you can get with UPDF:

1. Read PDFs: It allows PDF readers to conveniently read PDFs in different layouts, light/dark mode, etc.
2. Edit PDFs: It can add or edit text, images, links, backgrounds, and other elements in the PDF.
3. Convert PDFs: It can convert PDFs to plenty of other formats other than Excel, such as Word, PowerPoint, image, text, RTF, etc.
4. Annotate PDFs: Its annotation feature allows you to draw, underline, mark, highlight, add stickers/stamps, insert comments, etc.
5. UPDF AI: Its ChatGPT-powered AI assistant serves as a virtual assistant to interact with PDFs to ask questions about the content or get a summary, translation, or explanation.
6. Organize PDFs: It can add, remove, split, extract, or replace PDF pages.
7. Secure PDFs: It can password-protect, redact, or watermark PDFs.
8. Compress PDFs: It can shrink the size of large PDFs.

Overall, UPDF is an all-in-one PDF converter and editor tool that offers all the feature-rich functionalities you need to handle PDF documents efficiently. So, download UPDF and fulfill your PDF conversion and editing needs effortlessly.

Conclusion

The need to convert Adobe PDF to Excel can arise at times, especially when you want to analyze data more thoroughly. You can use Adobe Acrobat Pro or Adobe Online to perform the conversion, but the concerns of formatting issues, slow processing of large files, batch conversion complications, and costly plans hinder the experience. Alternatively, UPDF seems a more powerful option, as its AI-driven approach, fast processing, click-based batch conversion, and cost-friendliness make it the best for converting Adobe PDF to XLS.