Today I’m excited to let you be the first to know that, hot on the heels of our PDF to Word release, we have launched a brand-new PDF to Excel service. We believe it’s the first free tool for converting PDF to the XLS format.

PDF to Excel takes care of the normally messy, tedious and manual job of getting tabular content out of PDF files for reuse as editable spreadsheets and tables. The files we create work in Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice, Google Docs, Corel WordPerfect and whatever other applications that open XLS files.

Here’s how it works:

1. Head to the http://www.pdftoexcelonline.com site
2. Select a PDF to convert, enter your email address, and submit the file
3. Our server processes the file (identifying tables, discarding other content and packaging the tables into a XLS file) and then emails it
4. You check your email in a minute or two
5. All done.

There’s a tendency online to equate ‘free’ with ‘cheap and nasty,’ but that’s not what Nitro is about with our free PDF tools. Like our PDF-to-Word service, we think our PDF-to-Excel converter stacks up extremely well against the tools that you must pay for. The key areas where we think we have raised the bar are:

• Fully-automated processing. Most existing tools are unable to automatically scan PDF files, detect and then extract just table content — meaning you have to manually select each table to extract them or alternatively you receive an XLS file containing the entire contents of the PDF, which you must sift through to hopefully find your tables.
• Retaining the look and feel of tables. Most PDF-to-Excel converters don’t attempt to retain the look of tables at all. We get right into it. The example below shows you the kinds of formatting we can handle, including fonts sizes and styles, borders, cell colors and row and column spacing.

Over the past month, we’ve had quite a few inquiries about where to go to download our converter? Well, at this stage it is an online service only. Our desktop product — Nitro PDF Professional 6 — is due for release soon, which will include the PDF to Excel converter technology used in our free conversion service, only it’ll have some extra capabilities. Standby for that.

We’d love to hear what you think about our latest free tool, please try out PDF to Excel and share your thoughts here.

• PDF to Excel – http://www.pdftoexcelonline.com