ForHosting KIT · Documents & PDF

Convert PDF to Excel

The numbers you need are sitting in a PDF table, and retyping them is where errors start. This endpoint finds tabular data inside a PDF and rebuilds it as actual spreadsheet cells — rows, columns and values you can sum, sort and filter, not a screenshot pasted into a grid.

● BetaPer request + per page$0.010

Run — $0.010 + $0.0575/page How it works & API

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Run it online

Run this on our servers with your account. Free tools run in your browser; this one bills your KIT balance per the price above.

Why tables in a PDF are stuck

A PDF doesn't store a table the way a spreadsheet does — it stores lines, boxes and positioned text, and a human brain reconstructs the grid on sight. Copy-pasting a PDF table into Excel usually gives you one column of jumbled text or numbers that lose their decimal alignment. This is the specific, narrow problem this endpoint is built to solve: reading the visual structure of a table and turning it back into rows and columns Excel actually understands.

Who needs a table back, not a document

Analysts pulling figures out of a vendor's quarterly PDF report, accountants reconciling a bank statement that only arrives as PDF, researchers digitizing tables from published papers or government filings, procurement teams comparing supplier price lists sent as static PDFs. Anywhere the source data is trapped as a picture-like table and the destination needs to be a working spreadsheet, this is the bridge.

What comes back

Send the PDF, receive a task_id right away, and the job detects tables on each page and writes them into an XLSX with values in real cells — ready for a SUM formula, a pivot table or a VLOOKUP, not just readable text. Native (digital) PDFs give the cleanest extraction; scanned PDFs are read with OCR first, so results depend on scan quality.

Fitting into a data pipeline

Because results land by webhook, this slots into ingestion pipelines without polling: a finance system watches an inbox for supplier PDFs, fires a conversion request per file, and loads the resulting XLSX straight into its reconciliation process the moment the webhook confirms it's ready.

A note on where PDF tables come from

PDF was designed in the early 1990s to preserve exactly how a page looks when printed, which is precisely why it's so bad at preserving what a table structurally is. Spreadsheets, by contrast, have stored tabular data as literal rows and columns since the earliest electronic versions in the late 1970s. Converting one into the other is really translating between two different ideas of what a table is — visual layout versus structured data.

What you can do with it

Vendor report reconciliation

A quarterly PDF report from a supplier contains pricing tables; extracting them to XLSX lets finance reconcile against internal records without retyping.

Bank statement analysis

A bank only issues statements as PDF; converting the transaction table to Excel enables filtering and categorizing without manual entry.

Research data digitization

A researcher needs the numeric tables from a published PDF paper in spreadsheet form to run further analysis.

Price list comparison

Procurement receives supplier price lists as PDFs and converts each to XLSX to compare line items side by side.

FAQ

Is the PDF to Excel API live?

Yes, it's live now and ready to accept jobs.

How is it priced?

$0.010 per request plus $0.0575 per page — table extraction is the more processing-heavy step, which is reflected in the per-page rate.

Does it work on scanned PDFs?

Yes, through OCR, but results depend on scan quality. Native, digitally created PDFs extract most reliably.

What if a page has no table?

Pages without detectable tabular structure are skipped for that page rather than producing garbled output.

Do I get real spreadsheet cells or just text?

Real cells — rows and columns you can sum, sort, and reference in formulas, not text pasted into a grid.

Is there a free tier?

There's no free tier — free tiers get abused and slow everyone down. Access runs on a prepaid ForHosting KIT balance: top up from $10.00 (it never expires) and each request is charged at its published price, so a call with no balance returns HTTP 402. No subscription, no tokens, no invented credits, and a failed task is never charged.

How do I get the XLSX file?

By signed webhook when the job finishes, or from a signed link that stays valid for 24 hours.

Am I charged for a failed extraction?

No. Failed tasks retry automatically up to three times and are never billed — you get a clear error instead.

For developers — API access

Everything on this page is available programmatically. This section is for teams who want to wire it into their own systems; everyone else can just use the tool above.

API endpoint

POSThttps://api.kit.forhosting.com/doc/pdf-to-excel

Prefer to automate it? One authenticated POST creates the task; the result comes back by webhook or a signed link. The same capability also runs here on the web, and soon from our app, email and Telegram.

Call it from your stack

curl -X POST https://api.kit.forhosting.com/doc/pdf-to-excel \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KIT_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d &#39;{"input":"…"}'

const res = await fetch("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/doc/pdf-to-excel", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    "Authorization": `Bearer ${process.env.KIT_KEY}`,
    "Content-Type": "application/json"
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    "input": "…"
  })
});
const { task_id } = await res.json();

import os, requests

res = requests.post(
    "https://api.kit.forhosting.com/doc/pdf-to-excel",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ[&#39;KIT_KEY']}"},
    json={
    "input": "…"
},
)
task_id = res.json()["task_id"]

<?php
$res = file_get_contents("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/doc/pdf-to-excel", false, stream_context_create([
  "http" => [
    "method"  => "POST",
    "header"  => "Authorization: Bearer " . getenv("KIT_KEY") . "\r\nContent-Type: application/json",
    "content" => &#39;{"input":"…"}',
  ],
]));
$task = json_decode($res, true);

body := bytes.NewBufferString(`{"input":"…"}`)
req, _ := http.NewRequest("POST", "https://api.kit.forhosting.com/doc/pdf-to-excel", body)
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+os.Getenv("KIT_KEY"))
req.Header.Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
res, _ := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)

Example request

{
  "input": "…"
}

Example response

{
  "task_id": "tsk_a1b2c3d4e5f6a1b2c3d4e5f6",
  "type": "doc.pdf_to_excel",
  "status": "queued",
  "_links": {
    "result": "/tasks/tsk_…/result"
  }
}

The API is asynchronous: the call returns a task_id immediately and the result arrives by webhook. Polling is capped at 1 req/s per task.

Pricing

Per request$0.010

Per page$0.0575

Published price — no tokens, no invented credits. A failed task is never charged.

Limits

`max_mb`	25
`max_pages`	200

Errors

HTTP	Code	Meaning
`401`	`unauthorized`	Missing or invalid API key.
`402`	`insufficient_balance`	Your balance doesn't cover the task price.
`404`	`unknown_type`	That task type doesn't exist.
`429`	`rate_limited`	Too many requests. Use the webhook instead of polling.
`413`	`input_too_large`	The file exceeds the size limit.
`422`	`task_failed`	The task failed after 3 retries. You are never charged for it.

Read the full KIT documentation →