Investintech PDF to Excel: Able2Extract and the Free Tool

Quick Answer: Investintech offers two ways to go from PDF to Excel: a free web converter at investintech.com/pdf-to-excel that needs no email and returns an XLSX, and Able2Extract Professional, a desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux with custom table selection, templates and OCR. Use the free page for a one-off digital PDF and the desktop app when you need to choose exactly which rows and columns come out.

Investintech is the company behind Able2Extract Professional, a PDF conversion app sold for a one-time fee. On investintech.com you can either upload a PDF to the free online converter, which works automatically, or download Able2Extract, which lets you draw a box around a table, adjust its column lines and save the layout as a reusable template.

What is the difference between the free converter and Able2Extract?

The two share a name on the website but behave very differently.

Prices are from the Investintech home page, read on 2026-10-26. The same page lists an optional upgrade to the newest version at $59.95 and a support plan at $49.95.

How do you use Investintech's free PDF to Excel converter?

The free converter page describes a short automatic flow:

1. Upload the PDF.
2. Conversion starts on its own; if the PDF is a scan, OCR runs as part of it.
3. Download the XLSX file.

Investintech states "No sign-up or email required to download your Excel file" and that files are "deleted one hour after conversion." Uploads are protected with "2048-bit RSA encryption with SHA-256," in the company's words. The page does not publish a file size or page cap, so very long documents are worth testing with a sample first.

What the free tool does not offer is any say over the result. You get whatever table structure the engine decides on. For a well-ruled report that is usually fine. For a document where tables sit inside paragraphs, or where one page holds two unrelated grids, the desktop app's selection tools are the reason it exists.

How does Able2Extract's custom table selection work?

Custom conversion is the feature that separates Able2Extract from automatic converters. The workflow below follows Investintech's own articles on precise table extraction and selecting tables among text.

Step 1: Open the PDF and select the area

Open the file in Able2Extract. Use the selection tool to drag a rectangle around the table you want. You can select a whole page, several pages, or just one block of a page; anything outside the selection is ignored.

Step 2: Choose a custom Excel conversion

Click the Excel icon on the command toolbar and choose Custom rather than Automatic. The Custom Excel panel opens alongside the document, with a preview area below.

Step 3: Fix the column and row lines

Able2Extract draws its best guess at column and row boundaries over your selection. In the custom panel you can add, move or delete those lines. This is where you fix the classic problems: a description column that the engine split in two, or two narrow amount columns it merged.

Step 4: Find similar tables

If the same table continues across many pages, click Find Similar in the Tables section of the panel. Able2Extract searches the document for tables with the same structure and applies your column layout to all of them. Review Tables… under Named Table Structures lists what it found by page range, so you can drop false matches.

Step 5: Preview and convert

Check the preview panel. When the rows look right, run the conversion and save the workbook.

Step 6: Save a template for next time

If you receive the same report every month, save the layout as a template. Next month you load the template, and the same columns and rows are applied without redrawing anything.

For simpler jobs there is also the plain route: select an area, click Convert To Excel, and pick Automatic PDF to Excel, which hands the selected region to the automatic engine.

What does the Able2Extract trial let you do?

According to Investintech's download page, the trial "lasts for 7 consecutive days" from installation and needs no credit card. During the trial you can convert one file in full; after that, conversions are limited to three pages per PDF at a time. That is enough to judge whether custom selection fixes your particular layout, but not enough to process a backlog.

System notes from the same page: it runs on 64-bit Windows 10 and 11, recent macOS releases and several Ubuntu and Fedora versions. The Mac build targets x86, so Apple Silicon machines run it through Rosetta 2.

When is Investintech the right tool?

Able2Extract earns its price when your PDFs are irregular and you need control, and when you convert the same layout repeatedly. Typical fits:

• annual reports and statistical publications where tables are embedded in text,
• supplier price lists that arrive in the same layout every quarter,
• engineering or inventory reports with many columns,
• offline work, where uploading the file is not allowed.

It is less compelling when:

• you convert one PDF a year, which the free web page or Excel's built-in PDF import handles,
• your documents are all one type that a specialised tool already understands.

Bank and credit card statements are the obvious example of that last case. A template in Able2Extract can handle one bank's layout well, but each bank's layout needs its own template, and you still sign the amounts and remove balance-forward rows yourself. A statement converter such as QuickBankConvert reads the transactions directly and outputs date, description and a signed amount per row, which is less setup if statements are most of what you convert. If you are comparing installable converters more broadly, our guide to PDF to Excel software puts Able2Extract next to Acrobat, Nitro and Foxit.

Tips for cleaner Investintech output

• Select less. Leaving logos, address blocks and footnotes outside the selection removes most junk rows.
• Delete column lines before adding them. Starting from fewer lines and adding only the ones you need is quicker than fixing an over-split grid.
• Check number formats. After conversion, confirm amounts are numbers, not text, by summing a column.
• Keep the template with the file type. Name templates by source and layout so you pick the right one next time.
• For scans, check digits. OCR can read 8 as 3 or drop a decimal point; compare totals with the printed figures.

If you have Microsoft 365 on Windows, try one more free option before buying anything: Data > Get Data > From File > From PDF in Excel lists the tables Power Query detects and lets you load them without uploading the file anywhere. It has no drawing tools, so it falls short where Able2Extract shines, but on a cleanly ruled PDF it can make the purchase unnecessary.

For other table-by-table approaches, including Power Query, see our guide on converting a PDF table to Excel.

Related guides

• Desktop and offline PDF to Excel software compared
• Pulling a single table out of a PDF
• Statement PDFs to Excel rows