For developers or users who prefer the terminal, Ubuntu offers several lightweight packages:
Tabula is a specialized, open-source tool designed specifically to extract tables from PDFs and convert them into CSV or Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. It is widely used by investigative journalists and researchers for its accuracy in handling complex layouts.
Accurate extraction of data tables without losing row/column alignment. 2. LibreOffice: The All-in-One Native Solution
Advanced users can use the soffice --headless --convert-to command for various format conversions, though PDF-to-Excel is more reliably handled via its GUI. 3. Command-Line Tools (CLI)