How to Convert PDF to CSV: 5 Effective Methods

Why did you send me a PDF? We've all been there.

The Portable Document Format (PDF) was invented by Adobe in the 90s. The goal was to make every file look the same, no matter what screen you viewed it on. Today, the PDF is a common file format because it allows the sender of the document to ensure that the file is read only. This makes it a common file format for sending documents to other people or businesses. PDFs are often used for invoices, bills, customer orders, logistics documents and more.

Teams often find themselves needing to convert PDFs to CSV so that they can compare data or enter it into a system. For example, an accounts payable team might want to convert all incoming vendor invoices into a CSV so that they can reconcile amounts against their own internal records (e.g. purchase orders). Here are other common use cases:

Extracting data from freight documents
Processing insurance claim documents
Updating inventory based on catalogs and purchase orders
Extracting data from bank statements

Here are 5 effective methods to convert PDF to CSV:

Manual Extraction: Copy and paste or manually transcribe data from PDF to a spreadsheet.
AI Assistants: Use tools like ChatGPT or Claude to extract and structure data from PDFs.
Web-based Converters: Utilize online tools such as SmallPDF, PDFGuru, or PDFTables for occasional conversions.
AI Document Processing: Employ advanced AI systems for high-volume, automated PDF data extraction.
Kili: Convert your PDFs to CSV files within minutes using our AI platform

Each method has its own advantages depending on your needs, volume of documents, and desired accuracy. We'll explore these options in detail below.

Manually Converting PDF to CSV

For the sake of establishing a baseline, let's get the obvious method out of the way: extracting data manually. In most cases, users will have to manually transcribe each value from the PDF into an Excel file. If you're lucky, the PDF may be in a format that allows you to copy and paste data page by page into Excel. Even if this is the case, the output needs to be checked manually. You could easily end up with numbers that are missing a digit at the start or the end. This approach requires no additional tools but is time-consuming and error prone. Several businesses outsource the data extraction to other agencies.

Using AI Tools to Transform PDF into CSV

AI assistants like ChatGPT or Claude can extract data from PDFs for you. Based on our experiments, ChatGPT is a superior option here because it will attempt to structure the data for you. Try a simple prompt like: "Extract xyz columns from this file and give it to me in a format that I can use to paste into Excel". The downsides of this approach are that it's still manual because you need to do one document at a time. In addition, we've found that accuracy is not very high. This method also doesn't do that well when you need to extract data from the table of a PDF. If you need to enter your data into another system like an ERP or accounting system, you will need to format your data before doing so. We recommend this method if you find yourself extracting data from a PDF occasionally and a little inaccuracy is not a problem.

Web-based PDF to CSV Converters

There are many web based tools that allow you to upload a PDF and extract data from it. For example, SmallPDF, PDFGuru or PDFTables. These tools are a good option if you process PDFs only occasionally and are happy to do each one individually. When considering a tool, pay most attention to the accuracy of the output. For example, OCR based tools may face challenges with handwritten text, complex layouts, or poor-quality scans. Optical character recognition (OCR), as the name implies, attempts to recognise characters and not words. As a result, you frequently end up with instances where all but a few characters in a word match. This means your team needs to sift through those invoices manually anyway.

AI Document Processing

AI document processing tools leverage a mix of large language models and vision models to extract data from PDFs. These systems can automatically identify and extract relevant information, process multiple documents simultaneously, and handle various layouts and formats. Some even offer validation and data cleaning features. They excel at processing large volumes of consistently formatted documents such as invoices, receipts, or contracts. Depending on the product, you may need to supply a sample of documents to "train" the product. If you process a large volume of documents and need to integrate the solution into your workflow, consider an AI document processing tool. Make sure to test the tool with your documents to verify the accuracy you need.

Kili: Automated PDF to CSV Conversion

Kili is an AI document processing platform that helps businesses extract data with zero engineering effort. We require no pre-training and users can get started in minutes. Every document is extracted and stored in a Board.

To extract data from PDFs into a CSV file, follow these steps:

Sign up for an account
Set up a board. A board is a collection of documents (e.g. invoices) you want to extract data from. You can define the fields you want to extract and the format of these fields.
Upload your documents
Click 'Export' and download your CSV

At Kili, we use a combination of text and vision based AI models to extract data. We are able to extract data from a PDF that is more useful than OCR. Every single entry is validated according to the format you request. In addition to the above, we can help you process documents via email and provide your team with a simple interface to update data when it's missing or incorrect. Get in touch with our team for a personalised demo of our product.

To close

PDFs are a common type of unstructured document format and teams frequently find themselves needing to extract data from PDFs to a CSV. You can extract data by doing it manually, using ChatGPT, using web-based tools or an AI document processing tool like Kili. If your team processes a high volume of documents and the accuracy of extraction is important, we recommend a document processing tool like Kili.