Convert PDF to XLS from Your Inbox With Mailparser

How to Convert PDF to XLS With Mailparser

Mailparser is a no-code email parser that hundreds of businesses use to extract data from incoming emails and send it where it needs to be. In fact, parsing PDF attachments is a common use case. Mailparser makes it quick and easy to extract relevant data from PDF files into a structured Excel spreadsheet. No need to dabble with coding or spend extra time cleaning conversion inaccuracies—you set up your parser once and you’re good to go.

Follow the steps below to convert PDF to XLS using Mailparser.

Step 1: Create an inbox

Firstly, sign up for a free Mailparser account. You will then see a button that says ‘Create Your First Inbox’. Click on it and type a name for your inbox. This inbox is where Mailparser will receive your PDFs as email attachments so that it can extract the data inside and make it available to download in Excel format.

After that, Mailparser will generate an email address for your inbox.

Step 2: Forward a sample email with a PDF attachment

Next, forward at least one email with a PDF attachment to your Mailparser inbox. You will get a confirmation message like this:

Select the option ‘Add Parsing Rules to Extract Data from Email Attachment’ and click on ‘Select & Continue to Setup Parsing Rules’.

Step 3: Create parsing rules

Now to the main part of setting up your email parser. You’re going to create parsing rules which are the instructions that Mailparser follows to identify each data field and extract it with total accuracy.

To show you how this works, we’re going to use a weekly POS (point of sale) report for an electronics store.

In the Quick Setup editor, you can see that Mailparser has already created parsing rules to extract data related to the reporting period and the name of the sales representative:

Note that you can always edit, rename, or deleted those parsing rules

To extract the actual POS report, we’re going to create a custom Rule. But before that, click on ‘Start with this template’.

Now, go to the Rule section in the left-hand side panel of your dashboard. You will see the two parsing rules created in the Quick  Setup. To create a new rule, click on the button ‘+ New Parsing Rule’.

Select ‘Attachment’ as the data source. The Rule editor will then extract the contents of the PDF file.

Scroll down a little bit. Since we want to extract the sales report, which is a table, click on the dropdown list titled ‘Parse attachments’ and select the option ‘File content (Table Cells)’. The rule editor will extract the table:

So as you can see, the table has been extracted from the PDF with its structure intact. And all it took was a couple of clicks.

Customize your rules

You can go further and customize your parsing rule to get even better results. For instance, you can remove the dollar sign from columns #4 and #5.

To do this, click on the button ‘Add Table Filter’, hover your cursor over ‘Refine Cell Values’, and select ‘Search & Replace”. Select ‘ALL’ in the dropdown list called ‘Look at Column #’ and type the dollar sign in the text field next to ‘and replace’.

You can also add table filters to remove the first row and add column headers outside the table data. All in all, feel free to tweak your parsing rule to your liking until you get the perfect result.

Once you’re done setting up this Parsing Rule, scroll down to the bottom of the rule editor and click on the button ‘Ok, Looks Good!’. Type a name for your rule (e.g. Sales Report) then click on ‘Validate & Save’.

Step 4: Download your Excel file

To download your parsed data in XLS format, click on ‘Downloads’ on the left-hand side panel and then click on the button ‘Create First Download Link’.

Next, select the XLS format from the four options available: XLS, CSV, JSON, and XML. After that, give a name to your file, change the spreadsheet settings if needed, then scroll down and click on ‘Save’.

Mailparser will generate a download link, so click on it and save your Excel file. You’re done!

Here’s what the XLS file looks like after a few formatting tweaks:

So that’s how you convert PDF to XLS with Mailparser. The whole process shouldn’t take more than a few minutes (if you find yourself stuck, you can always request assistance).