The PDF file format does not contain any structural tags (e.g. like the table tag in HTML). This means that extracting table data from PDF files is not that trivial. Tables are basically just fields arranged in a certain layout and there is no possibility to simply get all rows and columns. In case you are only dealing with a handful of PDF documents manual copy & paste might be the easiest solution. There are also tools like Tabula and PDFTables s which are really helpful to get a first raw spreadsheet. In case you are dealing with lots of PDF files and you need to batch process the same of document over and over again you have basically two options Develop a custom solution Use a PDF Parser software Developing a PDF data extraction solution on your own is possible and there are a couple of helpful open source tools which can help you dealing with PDF files Poppler-Utils s (to convert PDF into Text) OCRmyPDF s (to convert scanned files into PDF files) Tabula-Java s (the table extraction engine used in Tabula) In case you don't want to go down the route of developing your own solution have a look at Docparser s . I'm the founder of Docparser and our product does exactly what you are looking for. Once trained Docparser can convert a PDF layout into structured data and give you a CSV Excel JSON or XML file in return. We can also send the parsed data to your API in real-time.