AI-powered OCR extracts tables from scanned documents, photos, and image-based PDFs into clean Excel spreadsheets. No templates. No training data.
Here's the thing: a scanned PDF isn't really a document — it's a photo of one. Your computer sees pixels, not characters, which means there's no hidden text layer to grab and rearrange into spreadsheet cells.
Converting it to Excel actually requires two things happening at once: reading those pixels as text (OCR) and figuring out which text belongs in which row and column (layout analysis). That second part is where most tools quietly give up.
Honestly, most free converters just dump whatever OCR text they find into a single column and call it done. If you've ever tried pasting that mess into Excel, you know exactly how painful the cleanup gets.
Lido skips the "extract text first, sort it out later" approach entirely — the AI reads the visual layout of the page the same way you would, spotting table borders, column headers, and row breaks straight from the image.
Think of it like the difference between someone carefully reading a bank statement versus someone dumping all the words into a blender. One of those produces a usable spreadsheet; the other produces chaos.
The output is a properly structured Excel file with columns that actually line up, numbers formatted as numbers, and none of the manual reformatting you'd otherwise spend an afternoon on.
Resolution: 300 DPI is the floor, not the target — especially if your document has small text like footnotes or decimal points in financial tables. In my experience, 400 DPI on older faded documents makes a noticeable difference.
Color mode: Scan in color if you can. It sounds counterintuitive, but color scans give the AI more contrast to work with when separating text from background and identifying faint gridlines.
Alignment: A little skew is fine — up to about 5–10 degrees gets corrected automatically. Beyond that, column alignment starts to suffer, so it's worth taking an extra second to straighten the page.
Smartphone photos: These work surprisingly well, but only if you use a scanning app like Adobe Scan or Microsoft Lens instead of your regular camera app. The perspective correction alone is worth it.
Invoices, bank statements, purchase orders, lab results, tax forms — basically anything with rows and columns. Lido doesn't need a template or any setup; it figures out the structure on its own each time.
The trickiest cases are faded thermal receipts, multi-generation photocopies, and pages with handwritten notes scrawled over printed text — those are worth a quick review after conversion. But even then, you're usually correcting a handful of cells rather than rebuilding the whole thing from scratch.
Upload a scanned PDF and see it converted to a clean Excel spreadsheet in seconds. 50 free pages, no credit card required.
Yes. Modern AI-powered converters perform OCR and layout analysis simultaneously, reading the table structure from the visual image rather than relying on embedded text layers. Lido processes scanned documents with the same accuracy as digital PDFs, extracting rows, columns, and cell values into clean Excel spreadsheets without templates or configuration.
For best results, scan at 300 DPI or higher in color. Grayscale scans lose contrast that helps the AI separate text from background. Keep pages straight and ensure consistent lighting. Smartphone photos are acceptable if taken with a scanning app that provides auto-crop and perspective correction. Lido handles moderate skew and uneven lighting automatically.
50 free pages. All features included. No credit card required.