Lido: Effortless PDF to Excel Conversion That Saves You Time

Key insights

• Lido is a cloud-based platform that lets users convert PDF files to Excel spreadsheets quickly and accurately, using AI-powered extraction tools.


• The IMPORTPDF and EXTRACTTABLESFROMPDF formulas allow users to extract data from both text-based and scanned PDFs directly into spreadsheet cells, making manual data entry unnecessary.


• Lido’s PDF Data Extractor tool automatically detects tables and columns in uploaded documents, supporting batch processing for multiple PDFs at once.


• Customizable Extraction Instructions let users specify which columns or data fields to include or ignore, ensuring accurate results even with complex documents like invoices.


• The platform supports exporting extracted data as Excel or CSV files, allowing easy integration with other workflows and eliminating problems caused by copy-paste restrictions in some PDFs.


• Lido’s 2025 updates include improved AI extraction, enhanced support for image-to-table conversion, seamless Google Drive integration, and user-friendly interfaces for handling various document formats efficiently.

Introduction: Streamlining PDF to Excel Conversion with Lido

Converting data from PDF files to Excel spreadsheets has long been a challenge for businesses and individuals alike. Traditional methods often require tedious manual entry or unreliable copy-pasting, leading to errors and wasted time. However, a recent YouTube video by David Benaim introduces Lido, an AI-powered tool that promises to simplify and automate this process. According to Benaim, Lido’s approach allows users to extract tables and data from PDFs with high accuracy, cutting down hours of work into just a few minutes.

The video provides a comprehensive demonstration of how Lido functions, emphasizing its ease of use and advanced data extraction features. As organizations increasingly rely on digital documents, tools like Lido are becoming essential for efficient data management. This article summarizes the key points from Benaim’s video, exploring how Lido works, its advantages, practical steps, and the latest innovations in PDF-to-Excel conversion.

How Lido Works: Features and Functionality

Lido operates as a cloud-based spreadsheet platform, integrating powerful PDF extraction tools directly into an interface familiar to users of Excel or Google Sheets. The platform offers unique formulas such as IMPORTPDF and EXTRACTTABLESFROMPDF, which allow users to pull content from both text-based and scanned PDFs. These formulas can be entered directly into a Lido spreadsheet and linked to PDF files stored on Google Drive, making the process intuitive and seamless.

Additionally, Lido includes a PDF Data Extractor accessible from the menu, enabling users to upload files, detect data fields automatically, and extract multiple rows of information with minimal effort. The platform’s AI-driven customization options allow users to specify which columns or data points to extract, improving accuracy for complex documents like invoices. Lido’s support for multiple formats, including images such as PNG and JPG, further enhances its versatility for diverse data extraction needs.

Advantages and Tradeoffs of Lido’s Approach

Lido’s main strength lies in its automation and accuracy. By leveraging AI, it significantly reduces the need for manual corrections, ensuring that key information—such as invoice numbers, line items, and totals—is correctly transferred to structured columns. The setup process is straightforward: users simply sign up, upload or link their PDF files, adjust extraction settings if necessary, and export the results to Excel.

However, while automation streamlines workflow, there can be tradeoffs between speed and customization. Some highly complex or irregular documents may still require user guidance to achieve perfect results. Lido addresses this by allowing customizable extraction instructions, but users must balance the convenience of automation with the need for manual oversight in specific cases.

Step-by-Step Guide to Using Lido

The video outlines a clear, step-by-step process for converting PDFs to Excel with Lido. First, users create a free account and open a new spreadsheet within the platform. To import PDF data, they can use the =IMPORTPDF formula for text-based documents or switch to =EXTRACTTABLESFROMPDF or the graphical Data Extractor tool for scanned files and tables.

Connecting Google Drive allows for direct access to stored PDFs, keeping workflows entirely within the cloud. Users can then customize which data points to extract, provide additional AI instructions for improved accuracy, and finally run the extraction to populate their spreadsheet. The clean, structured data is easily exported as an Excel file, making the entire process both efficient and accessible.

Innovations and Improvements in 2025

Lido’s 2025 update introduces several enhancements designed to improve both performance and user experience. The platform’s AI algorithms have been upgraded to better understand document layouts, resulting in more precise field extraction and less manual correction. Users now have access to multiple extraction methods tailored to different PDF types, ensuring flexibility across a wide range of documents.

Integration with Google Drive streamlines the handling of cloud-based files, while the addition of image-to-table conversion broadens Lido’s applicability beyond traditional PDFs. These improvements reflect the ongoing challenges of balancing automation with the need for accuracy and customization, particularly as document formats continue to evolve.

Conclusion: Balancing Efficiency and Flexibility

As highlighted in David Benaim’s video, Lido represents a significant step forward in converting PDFs to Excel with minimal effort and high accuracy. Its AI-driven approach reduces manual workload while offering enough flexibility to handle complex documents when needed. Although no automated tool is perfect for every scenario, Lido’s continuous improvements and adaptable extraction methods make it a valuable resource for anyone seeking to streamline their data workflows in 2025.

By weighing the benefits of automation against the need for occasional manual input, users can maximize both efficiency and data quality. As digital documentation becomes ever more prevalent, tools like Lido are poised to play a central role in helping organizations manage and leverage their data effectively.

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