How to convert a PDF price list to Excel
Whether a PDF converts cleanly depends on one thing first: is the text real text or a picture of text? After that it’s about choosing the right tool and cleaning up the usual mess of headers, merged cells and number formats.
First, check what kind of PDF you have
Open the PDF and try to select a product name with your cursor. If you can highlight individual words, the PDF has a text layer and tables can be extracted. If the whole page highlights as one block, or nothing highlights, it is a scanned image and needs OCR (optical character recognition) first. Also check that the file isn’t password protected against copying.
Your options, honestly compared
| Method | Good for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Copy and paste | A single short table. | Columns collapse into one; multi-line cells split across rows. |
| Excel’s PDF import (Data → Get Data → From File → From PDF) | Text-based PDFs with clear tables, in Excel for Microsoft 365 on Windows. | Not available in every Excel edition; each page’s table can arrive as a separate query. |
| Adobe Acrobat “Export PDF” to Excel | Mixed layouts, if you already pay for Acrobat. | Merged cells and repeated headers need cleaning. |
| OCR tools | Scanned price lists. | Misread digits (0/O, 1/l, 5/S) in prices and SKUs; check everything. |
| A catalog converter such as Sheet2Store | Going straight from a text-based supplier PDF to a store import. | Scanned PDFs aren’t supported; up to 25 pages per file. |
Clean-up checklist after extraction
- Repeated header rows on every page: delete all but the first.
- Multi-line product names split over two rows: merge them back into one cell.
- Merged cells (a model name spanning several size rows): unmerge and fill the value down so every row has it.
- Prices as text with currency symbols or spaces: strip them and convert to numbers.
- Decimal commas:
1.250,50is one thousand two hundred fifty and a half. Don’t delete commas blindly: that multiplies prices by 100 or 1,000. - Leading zeros in SKUs and barcodes: format those columns as Text before pasting.
- Section titles and notes (“New season”, “Prices ex. VAT”): move them out of the product table.
Keep a link to the source
Add a column with the page number of each row. When a price looks wrong later, you can find the line in the PDF in seconds instead of rereading the catalog. It matters most for large catalogs where a single misread digit is easy to miss.
If the spreadsheet is only a step towards your store
Many people convert a PDF to Excel only to reshape it again into a Shopify or WooCommerce import. Sheet2Store’s PDF converter skips the middle step: it reads product tables from text-based supplier PDFs (up to 25 pages and 500 variant rows), keeps a page reference on every row, uses assisted extraction for readable pages whose tables aren’t machine-detectable, and exports a store CSV plus a review Excel file with your source costs and selling prices side by side. Preview five rows free.
Frequently asked questions
Can Google Sheets convert a PDF?
Not directly. Opening a PDF with Google Docs from Google Drive runs OCR and gives you text, but tables usually need rebuilding by hand.
Why do numbers come out as text?
Extracted values often keep spaces, currency symbols or non-breaking characters. Remove them, then convert the column to numbers.
What about product photos in the PDF?
Table extraction tools don’t give you image files with URLs. Ask the supplier for the original images or a link to download them.
Turn a supplier file into an import-ready CSV
Upload a supplier PDF, Excel or CSV price list. Map the columns, set your markup, fix flagged rows and download a Shopify or WooCommerce CSV. The first five rows are free to preview.