Why you cannot copy from the PDF
In most cases, the PDF is not \"real text\". It is a scanned image of a paper statement (or an export where text selection is blocked). Copy & paste then returns nothing or broken gibberish.
The solution is to extract the table structure with OCR/AI and then export it as a structured CSV/Excel file.
Fix options
1) OCR / AI conversion (best)
Upload the PDF and let OCR extract transactions into clean columns.
2) Manual retyping (slow)
Works for very small volumes, but is error-prone and does not scale.
Recommended: KontoCSV
KontoCSV is optimized for bank statement layouts and includes OCR for scans. You get a ready-to-import CSV/Excel export in seconds.
FAQ
How can I tell if it\'s a scan?
Try selecting a single word. If you can only select large blocks like an image (or nothing at all), it is scanned.
Will Excel import fix this?
Not reliably. Excel does not reconstruct statement tables from scanned PDFs. OCR/AI conversion is the correct approach.
German original
The full German version (with more examples) is here:
Open German article