Once you installed it and clicked on the tool icon, it will open in your browser, like Firefox or Chrome. Tabula is a small open-source software that you can download on your Windows or Mac. The first tool we'll show you that lets you extract data tables out of PDFs is Tabula: Every PDF table is a bit different (some are over-designed, some use weird text formations), so if one solution doesn't work for your specific PDF, you can try another one. There are many tools out there that try to solve this problem.
If we then try to copy and paste the numbers from there into a spreadsheet, the columns and/or rows won't translate: Often, our data doesn't come in a neat Excel sheet or csv, but is buried as a table in a PDF, like in this report by the United Nations: This article explains three tools to extract data tables out of PDFs: The open-source tool Tabula and the commercial tools, smallpdf and cometdocs.
