Tabula is a tool for liberating data tables trapped inside PDF files.
Tabula was created by journalists for journalists and anyone else working with data locked away in PDFs. Tabula will always be free and open source.
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.
Caveat: Tabula only works on text-based PDFs, not scanned documents. If you can click-and-drag to select text in your table in a PDF viewer (even if the output is unorganized trash), then your PDF is text-based and Tabula should work.
Security Concerns? Tabula is designed with security in mind. Your PDF and the extracted data never touch the net -- when you use Tabula, as long as your browser's URL bar says "localhost" or "127.0.0.1", all processing takes place on your local machine. Tabula does download a list of Tabula versions from our server to alert you if Tabula has been updated (and we use hits to that list to count how often Tabula is being used); it also downloads a few badges and assets from the web.
Tabula is used to power investigative reporting at news organizations of all sizes, including ProPublica, The Times of London, Foreign Policy, La Nación (Argentina) 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.
Tabula was created by Manuel Aristarán, Mike Tigas and Jeremy B. Merrill with the support of ProPublica, La Nación DATA, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, The New York Times, Northwestern University Knight Lab, The Knight Foundation, and The Shuttleworth Foundation. Tabula was designed by Jason Das.