How to Extract Text and Tables From a PDF
A PDF can look exactly like a spreadsheet without behaving like one at all — rows, columns, numbers lined up neatly, and not a single cell you can actually select, copy, or run a formula against. That gap between "looks structured" and "is structured" is the whole reason extraction tools exist.
Plain text
If you just need the words — a report, an article, a contract — the PDF to Text Extractor pulls the text content straight out. Upload the file, download the extracted text, done.
Tabular data specifically
Tables need a different approach, since plain text extraction tends to flatten a table's structure into a confusing wall of numbers with the column alignment lost. The PDF to CSV Converter is built for this case — it's aiming to preserve rows and columns as an actual CSV file you can drop straight into a spreadsheet.
The limitation both tools share
Both of these work on PDFs that contain real, selectable text underneath. A PDF that's actually a scanned image of a page — the kind where you can't select any text at all in a normal PDF viewer — has nothing for these tools to extract, because there's no text there to find, just pixels arranged to look like text. That's a fundamentally different problem (OCR, optical character recognition) than text extraction, and it's worth checking which situation you're actually in before assuming a tool "isn't working" — try selecting text in the original PDF first; if you can't, extraction won't help either.