It pays off most on bank statements: dozens of pages of transactions that would otherwise be retyped by hand. The same applies to accounting reports and reconciliation acts, supplier price lists with hundreds of items, product catalogues with prices and SKUs, and government exports (tax, statistics, registries) that only get released as PDF. One pass yields an XLSX or CSV ready for filters, pivot tables, and loading into ERP, CRM, or BI systems.
Electronic PDFs – where the table is a real structure rather than an image – work best: row and column borders are visible and the text can be selected with the mouse. For such files the service reconstructs structure close to manual transfer. Scanned tables (a flat image with no text layer) must be passed through OCR first – without it there is nothing to extract, since to a PDF the table is just a grid of pixels.
XLSX is convenient when there are many tables and you want them to open straight away with headers and sheets. CSV is handy for import into accounting systems and databases – the most universal data format, readable everywhere. If the source contains several tables per page, the tool extracts them separately rather than concatenating them – structure is preserved.