Camelot — The Complete Guide: Extracting PDF Tables to Excel and CSV with Python
Camelot is an open-source Python library that does one thing well: it extracts tables from PDF files without any manual retyping. The licence is MIT, processing is local, and no registration is needed.
Camelot
Camelot developers (camelot-dev)
Python library for extracting tables from PDF files into data frames, CSV, Excel or JSON, with several parsing methods for ruled and unruled tables.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Lattice method — for tables with grid lines.
- Stream and network methods — for whitespace-separated tables.
- Automatic choice — the library can pick a method for each page.
- pandas data frames — ready for calculations and filtering in code.
- Broad export — CSV, Excel, JSON, HTML, Markdown and SQLite.
When it works — and when it does not
Camelot is excellent for moving tables of steel sections, loads and material values from a PDF catalogue or standard into a spreadsheet. The standard methods need a PDF with real text, the kind where you can select words. Scans need the optional ml and OCR extras, or a first pass through OCRmyPDF. There is no graphical interface, so a Jupyter notebook is a comfortable place to work with it.
Related tools
For interactive work with the results — JupyterLab. For tables inside scanned documents — PaddleOCR. For converting a whole document with tables to Markdown — Docling.
JupyterLab
Project Jupyter
Interactive computing notebooks — code, results, plots and explanations in one shareable document.
Get it from the vendor
PaddleOCR
PaddlePaddle (Baidu)
Open-source Python OCR and document parsing toolkit: text recognition in dozens of languages, page layout, tables and PDF to Markdown or JSON.
Get it from the vendor
Docling
Docling Project (originally IBM Research)
Open-source tool that converts PDF, DOCX and scanned images to Markdown or JSON, with table structure recognition and OCR, running locally.
Get it from the vendor
OCRmyPDF
OCRmyPDF project
Adds a searchable text layer to scanned PDFs — old reports, standards and drawings become searchable.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
If you copy tables from PDFs into Excel more than once a month, a few lines of Camelot will save you hours and cut typing errors.