Tabula
Tabula is a tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files. Extract tables from PDFs.
Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source
Alerts
- Discontinued
Platforms
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
The latest version (1.2.1) is from June 2018.
Features
Properties
- Lightweight
Features
- Portable
- Convert PDF to Excel document
- Tables
- Convert PDF to Text
Tags
- extract-multipage-tables
- pdf-tool
- pdf-to-csv
- PDF to JSON
- table
- auto-detect-structured-data
Tabula News & Activities
Recent News
Recent activities
- RemovedUser updated Tabula
Tabula information
Developed by
Manuel Aristarán, Mike Tigas and Jeremy B. Merrill Licensing
Open Source (MIT) and Free product.Written in
Alternatives
21 alternatives listedSupported Languages
- English
AlternativeTo Category
Office & ProductivityGitHub repository
- 7,287 Stars
- 679 Forks
- 541 Open Issues
- Updated
What is Tabula?
How Can Tabula Help Me? If you’ve ever tried to do anything with data provided to you in PDFs, you know how painful it is — there's no easy way to copy-and-paste rows of data out of PDF files. Tabula allows you to extract that data into a CSV or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet using a simple, easy-to-use interface. Tabula works on Mac, Windows and Linux.
Who Uses Tabula? Tabula is used to power investigative reporting at news organizations of all sizes, including ProPublica, The Times of London, Foreign Policy, La Nación (Argentina), The New York Times and the St. Paul (MN) Pioneer Press.
Grassroots organizations like SchoolCuts.org rely on Tabula to turn clunky documents into human-friendly public resources.
And researchers of all kinds use Tabula to turn PDF reports into Excel spreadsheets, CSVs, and JSON files for use in analysis and database applications.
Comments and Reviews
I like Tabula because it's the best, free, and opensource software that can quickly and easily extract structured data from PDFs.
It's quite powerful, yet easy to use. I've used it on PDF documents with table structured text data, with 100s of pages - to quickly extract this data into a csv format, enabling me to then import this data into a database.
It has a powerful Autodetect Tables feature, along with tools and settings to tweak and customise it's table recognition.
In my experience, it has been exceptionally accurate.
I've not used any paid tools, but this is THE best free tool. I have tried using Word, which does a very good job of converting PDFs into editable documents. But is a nightmare if you have a multipage document of structured data (say 400 page long table), and you want it to be converted to a structured format.
Cannot recommend more highly.