Portable Document Format files are not like word processing or spreadsheet files, meaning they don’t contain formatting, rows, and columns. Why PDF Won’t Convert to Excel Correctly?īut before we answer all of the questions above, let’s try to understand why so many users are unsatisfied with tables extracted from PDFs. Why is that so? Well, there’s a misconception that all PDF converters work the same way thus giving similar end results when it comes to PDF to Excel conversion.