Export PDF Comments and Markups to Excel
Read the comments and markups in a PDF and export them as a spreadsheet with author, subject, text, dates, colour, page and position. The document is not changed.
Tool workspace
Nothing is uploaded. Files are read in this tab and stay on your machine.
Extract comments and markups
Save your download before you leave the page — it exists only in this tab.
How do I export PDF comments to Excel?
Select one PDF. Its annotations are read from the document structure and summarised.
Check the completeness line and any note about annotations that were out of scope or left out.
Select Export to spreadsheet and save the result before leaving the page.
How are PDF comments read?
Extract the comments and markups from a PDF and export them as an .xlsx spreadsheet, one row per markup: author, subject, text, dates, colour, page and position. The document itself is not changed.
Annotations are read directly from each page’s list of annotations rather than from a rendering, so a comment is found whether or not any viewer could draw it. Comment and markup types are extracted; links, form fields and similar are counted separately as out of scope, because a link is not a lost comment and treating it as one would stop a fully read document ever reporting as complete. Every retained text field is counted against a size budget before its row is accepted, so one enormous comment cannot push the extraction past its limit unnoticed. Text a spreadsheet could read as a formula, such as a comment starting with =, +, - or @, is written with a leading apostrophe so it stays plain text. If your reviewers are still marking up PDFs and sending them back, Xenmark collects their comments on one shared copy of the drawing as they make them.
How Xenmark makes it easy to export PDF comments to Excel
One spreadsheet row per markup
Each comment or markup becomes a row with its page, type, author, subject, text, colour, created and modified dates, its own ID, and the ID of the comment it replies to.
Nothing leaves your machine
Nothing is uploaded. Files are read in this tab and processed in memory, with no account and no server for them to go to.
Fifteen markup types read, the rest counted
Notes, highlights, shapes, lines, ink, stamps, carets and more are extracted. Links, form fields and similar are counted by type and reported as out of scope.
Where each markup sits on the page
The left, bottom, right and top edges of each markup are written as numbers, with the page rotation and the page’s user unit, a scale some large-format PDFs apply to every coordinate.
A completeness verdict for the file
The summary states Complete, Partial or Unknown, and separately counts annotations left out by a limit and pages that could not be read at all.
Nothing to install
It runs in the browser you already have. There is no plug-in, no desktop application and no sign-up to get through first.
Limitations
What this tool does not do, stated up front.
Dates are written exactly as the file holds them, as text. A PDF date that states no time-zone offset has no single instant to convert to, and the sheet marks which rows those are.
The tool only reads. It never flattens, alters or validates anything, does not check digital signatures, and refuses encrypted PDFs rather than partly reading them.
One register takes at most 20,000 comments from the first 2,000 pages. Anything past that is left out, and the result reports what was left out.
Questions
How large a PDF can it read?
Up to 64 MiB and 2,000 pages, with at most 5,000 annotations of any kind on a page, and 20,000 rows and about 8 MiB of text in one spreadsheet. A field longer than 4,000 characters is shortened, and the Notes column says so.
Why are links and form fields not in the spreadsheet?
The register covers comment and markup annotations. Links, form fields and similar are counted separately rather than extracted, because they are not comments and counting them as missing would be wrong.
Does it include hidden markups and replies?
Yes. Markups marked hidden are read like any other, and a reply gets its own row. Its Reply to column holds the ID of the comment it answers, so the two rows can be matched.
Why did Xenmark build a free PDF comment extractor?
Xenmark AS is a Norwegian software company building browser-based drawing review tools for owners, consultants, operators and other teams that receive and review technical drawings. Those teams handle PDFs every day, and not every file should be sent to a website just to merge, split or check it — a tender document, a client’s drawing set, a revision that is not released yet. So these everyday tools are free and run entirely in your browser: no account, no upload step, and no server ever receives the file. You can check that yourself — open your browser’s network tab, extract the comments from a PDF, and watch nothing leave. What this tool cannot do is listed under Limitations above.
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Beyond the free tools
Reviewing the drawings, not just handling the files?
Xenmark is affordable PDF markup and structured drawing review in the browser. Invite reviewers, pin numbered comments on the sheet, track every one by author and status, and export a clean PDF and Excel when the review is done. Unlike these tools, a review is shared, so its drawings are uploaded to your Xenmark project.
Free forever plan. Reviewers you invite never pay.