Excel overview

Introduction

If you're trying to convert a PDF into an Excel spreadsheet, you often find tools that copy the PDF's visual layout into a spreadsheet, with no meaningful relationship between the extracted text and the underlying cells.

In contrast, Sensible converts document tables, checkboxes, paragraphs, and even complex repeating section layouts into meaningfully labeled column/row pairs and linked sheets. You can convert documents formatted as PDFs, PNGs, TIFFs, and JPEGs.

Prerequisites

To get a document's data into a spreadsheet, you must first:

• Configure extractions for a document type, either by authoring an extraction configuration using Sensible, or by using Sensible's open-source configuration library for common document types.

• Run an extraction on a target document that belongs to your configured document type using the Sensible app (single-document conversion) or the Sensible API (multiple document extraction).

Compile PDFs into one spreadsheet

To combine multiple PDFs into one multi-document spreadsheet, use the Sensible API.

Next

• For more information about how Sensible converts JSON document extractions to Excel, see SenseML to spreadsheet reference.
• For a tutorial about converting a PDF to an Excel sheet using the Sensible app, see Getting started with out-of-the-box extraction.
• To get started with extracting from your custom documents, see Overview.