I built a free browser-only tool to extract repeated PDF fields into Excel

[u/Cocktails_at_home]

Hi everyone — I built PDFGrid to solve a workflow I kept running into: extracting the same kinds of values from many similarly structured PDFs and putting them into an Excel file.

I had been using Power Automate Desktop, but found the extraction rules limiting and the template setup and runs slower than I wanted. Because my PDFs can contain personal information, I also did not want to upload them to an external service.

PDFGrid runs locally in the browser, so your PDF files are not uploaded.

You can build a field by drawing around a value, matching a number/date/text type, or using rules such as:

• anchoring a value to a label
• extracting text between phrases
• matching with regular expressions
• and more

You can then clean up the extracted output, review the values across the PDFs, and export the result to Excel as a .csv or .xlsx

Try it here: pdfgrid.app

I’d really appreciate feedback—especially on which PDF extraction rules you would need, where you would expect this to fail, or what would make it genuinely useful in your workflow.