Tabula is a tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files.

How Can Tabula Help Me?

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.

Who Uses Tabula?

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 a searchable, accessible public resource.

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.

How to Install Tabula

Note: You’ll need a copy of Java installed. You can download Java here.

1. Download the version of Tabula for your operating system:
• Windows: tabula-win.zip
• Mac OS X: tabula-mac.zip
  • OS X 10.8+ users: if you have issues opening the app, see note at bottom of download page
• Linux/Other: tabula-jar.zip (view README.txt inside for instructions)
2. Extract the zip file. (Instructions: Windows, Mac)
3. Go into the folder you just extracted. Run the "Tabula" program inside.
4. A web browser will open. If it doesn't, open your web browser, and go to http://localhost:8080. There's Tabula!

How to Use Tabula

1. Upload a PDF file containing a data table.
2. Select the table by clicking the top left corner of a table and dragging the mouse to the bottom right corner, until all of the data is included in the shaded selection area.
3. A window will then appear containing your data. Inspect the data to make sure it looks correct. If data is missing, you may have to slightly expand your selection.
4. Click the Download button.
5. Now you can work with your data as text file or a spreadsheet rather than a PDF!
   (You can open the downloaded file in Microsoft Excel or the free LibreOffice Calc)

Note: Tabula only works on text-based PDFs, not scanned documents.

Authors and Contributors

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 and The Knight Foundation.

Want to contribute? Fork it on GitHub and check out the to-do list for ideas.

Learn more about this project on Source: "Introducing Tabula"

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.