How To Import PDF Into Google Sheets

In this tutorial, you will learn how to import PDF into Google Sheets.

How To Import PDF Into Google Sheets

Have you ever wanted to copy data from a table in a PDF document? We can convert PDF files into Google Docs documents to make it easier to extract tabular data.

In this guide, we will look into two different methods to import PDF data into Google Sheets. The first method will cover cases where the converted PDF retains the data in a tabular format. The second method will handle instances where you must convert your data into a CSV format.

How to Add a PDF Table to Google Sheets

Here’s how to add a PDF table to Google Sheets.

Step 1

First, head to your desired Google Drive folder. Click on the New button to upload your PDF file.

Step 2

In the drop-down menu, select the File upload option.

Step 3

Wait for your file to be uploaded into Google Drive. Right-click on the uploaded file and select Open with > Google Docs.

Step 4

Google Drive will now create a copy of the PDF file in a Google Docs format. Double-click on the file to open it in another tab.

Step 5

The Google Docs file should have the tabular data from the PDF in an actual table. Copy the tabular data by using the shortcut Ctrl + C.

Step 6

Open the Google Sheets document where you want to import the tabular data. Select a cell to paste the results.

Step 7

Type the shortcut Ctrl + V to paste the tabular data into Google Sheets.

Step 8

Some PDFs format their tabular data differently. For example, the PDF below will not be converted into a properly-formatted table.

For these cases, we will have to use the Find and Replace tool to convert the data into a CSV.

Step 9

After uploading the PDF into Google Drive, right-click on the item and select Open with > Google Docs.

Step 10

You should now have a Google Docs document with the imported PDF data. However, instead of having tabulated data, the data is presented as a block of text.

Step 11

We can quickly convert the text into a CSV by replacing all the spaces with a comma. We can use the Find and replace tool to replace all the characters in a few clicks.

Step 12

Next, we’ll download the resulting file as a .txt file. To convert the file into a CSV, we can replace the file extension with .csv.

Step 13

In a new spreadsheet, we can use the Import option to add our CSV data.

Summary

This guide should be everything you need to import a PDF into Google Sheets.

Make a copy of this example spreadsheet to test it out yourself.