While Elliott Zaresky-Williams user 554155 is spot on Let consider the problem as stated by the OP a bit more The OP wants to extract data from a collection of Excel and PDF get amon set of fields and write amon output table. pandas does have read_excel() which for a reasonable format is quite easy to bring Excel fields into amon table. The plot thickens with PDFs. PDF is a graphical format as opposed to Excel being character based. Therefore getting data out of PDF is generally messier. PDF can represent arbitrary images and therefore might require using OCR to get . So a very important feature is the exact source and layout of the PDFs. I rmend the free book Automate the Boring Stuff with Python s to get a handle on this sort of tasks. Specific kinds of PDFs do require mach s s ine learning to get the proper information out of them for example allenai s and Camelot PDF Table Extraction for Humans s But the odds that youll need to use machine learning from scratch to build a solution for this problem are low.