# PDF to Excel without assistants?

**URL:** <https://community.make.com/t/pdf-to-excel-without-assistants/100885>\
**Category:** Questions\
**Tags:** chatgpt, ai\
**Created:** [January 14, 2026, 2:54pm UTC](https://community.make.com/t/pdf-to-excel-without-assistants/100885 "2026-01-14T14:54:54Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![VollCorner\_Biomarkt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/47e85d/32.png) [@VollCorner\_Biomarkt](https://community.make.com/u/VollCorner_Biomarkt)\
**Post date:** [January 14, 2026, 2:54pm UTC](https://community.make.com/t/pdf-to-excel-without-assistants/100885/1 "2026-01-14T14:54:54Z")

</div>

### 🎯 What is your goal?

I want to collect attachments in an email inbox, have OpenAI read them out (here’s where my scenario has failed so far) and format them as an excel file to download.

### 🤔 What is the problem & what have you tried?

This seems to have been possible via Message an Assistant. (The Generate a completion module still doesn’t allow to upload files within. Does anyone know if they’re planning to change this?) I can only select GPT3 und GPT4 models in the Assistant tho, which just feedback me that they don’t have the capability to return files. I read that OpenAI is phasing out the Assistants API and want us to move to the Responses API. I cannot find where to interact with that tho. Do I need to make my own API endpoints and use the Make an API call model instead now? Thanks for any help!

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Stoyan\_Vatov](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/5daacb/32.png) [@Stoyan\_Vatov](https://community.make.com/u/Stoyan_Vatov)\
**Post date:** [January 14, 2026, 5:32pm UTC](https://community.make.com/t/pdf-to-excel-without-assistants/100885/3 "2026-01-14T17:32:36Z")

</div>

Hey there,

reading PDFs is best done with a dedicated PDF OCR app. Something like [PDF.co](http://PDF.co) for example, or PDF4me.

Also, you don’t need it to return a file. Just a valid JSON with the data inside. You can then rework that data in a xlsx format.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Make\_Bot](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/user_avatar/community.make.com/make_bot/32/14661_2.png) [@Make\_Bot](https://community.make.com/u/Make_Bot)\
**Post date:** [February 5, 2026, 7:42am UTC](https://community.make.com/t/pdf-to-excel-without-assistants/100885/4 "2026-02-05T07:42:08Z")

</div>