Hi Luzuko Yena,

Yes, it is possible to extract only tables using Azure AI Document Intelligence.

Azure AI Document Intelligence provides multiple models to analyze documents, such as:

·       Prebuilt Layout Model

·       Prebuilt Document Model

·       Custom Models

To extract only tables, you should use the Layout Model, which is designed for this purpose.

What it does:

·       Extracts text lines

·       Extracts tables (structure + cell content)

·       Extracts selection marks (checkboxes)

 It does not extract key-value pairs or entities — perfect if you're only focused on layout elements like tables.

To Use (via REST API / SDKs / Azure Portal)

Example using Python SDK:

from azure.ai.formrecognizer import DocumentAnalysisClient
from azure.core.credentials import AzureKeyCredential

endpoint = "https://.cognitiveservices.azure.com/"
key = ""

document_analysis_client = DocumentAnalysisClient(
    endpoint=endpoint, credential=AzureKeyCredential(key)
)

# Use layout model
poller = document_analysis_client.begin_analyze_document(
    "prebuilt-layout", document=open("your_file.pdf", "rb")
)
result = poller.result()

# Extract tables only
for table in result.tables:
    print(f"\nTable with {table.row_count} rows and {table.column_count} columns")
    for cell in table.cells:
        print(f"Cell [{cell.row_index}, {cell.column_index}] - content: '{cell.content}'")

Hope this helps. Do let me know if you any further queries.


If this answers your query, do click Accept Answer and Yes for was this answer helpful. And, if you have any further query do let us know.

Thank you!  

Answer from Prashanth Veeragoni on learn.microsoft.com
🌐
Microsoft Azure
azure.microsoft.com › en-us › products › ai-foundry › tools › document-intelligence
Azure Document Intelligence (now part of Azure Content Understanding in Foundry Tools) | Microsoft Azure
Azure Document Intelligence is a powerful AI capability within Azure Content Understanding in Foundry Tools (formerly Azure AI Services) that enables organizations to automatically extract text, key-value pairs, tables, and document structure from files such as PDFs, images, and forms.
🌐
Microsoft Learn
learn.microsoft.com › en-us › azure › ai-services › document-intelligence › prebuilt › layout
Document layout analysis - Document Intelligence - Foundry Tools | Microsoft Learn
You can use Document Intelligence to extract data such as text, tables, table headers, selection marks, and structure information from documents. You need the following resources: An Azure subscription.
Discussions

Azure AI Document Intelligence - how to extract data when item or table is not consistently on the same page???
So…. The appendix doesn’t have any text “Appendix” anywhere? And no content page to refer the appendix? More on reddit.com
🌐 r/AZURE
4
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December 2, 2024
AI Document Extraction on Azure - Options, Comparison & Recommendations for Invoice/Contract Processing
I’m not familiar with the dev side but we use a hybrid approach, DI for as much as possible. But since some documents have stamps or notes on them we fallback to OAI for that. More on reddit.com
🌐 r/AZURE
17
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December 18, 2025
Advanced RAG for PDFs with tables and figures, capturing metadata , Azure Document Intelligent
Document intelligence is pretty straightforward, just a one-line API call. Unless you’re trying to extract tables and figures, it may be overkill. I’d recommend starting with a subset of PDFs with pypdf and only switch over to document intelligence once you see a clear lack of extraction accuracy. Document Intelligence also has a small latency issue just because you’re pinging an API rather than a local package. Most of the work will come from the processing of indexing. If you’re planning on using AI Search, I’d look into using semantic reranking and hybrid search. The former can be used to implement some basic knowledge graphs if you do some community detection methods on your embedded chunks. More on reddit.com
🌐 r/LangChain
5
6
April 2, 2024
Extract tables from PDF for RAG
I have literally been trying to do this since the past few weeks. Some notes : For just text, you can't depend on non OCR techniques. Sometimes, even non-scanned PDFs have some issues due to which text extraction doesn't work well. You need a hybrid approach(non-OCR + OCR) or a OCR only approach. Tables are a b*tch to parse. Merged cells especially. My final stack that i settled on : For Text : Use pytessaract. It does a decent job of parsing normal pdfs. For tables : Use img2table. convert pdf to image and then use img2table. You can even get a dataframe using img2table. For merged cells, it'll repeat the value across columns in the dataframe. Works better than I expected to be honest. If you want even more granular and varied information, this dude has some great stuff : https://github.com/VikParuchuri Also, folks at aryn.ai seem to be doing some great work related to parsing PDFs. They have an opensource library as well. Hope this helps! Reach out if you want some help with RAG stuff! More on reddit.com
🌐 r/LangChain
92
74
May 8, 2024
Top answer
1 of 2
1

Hi Luzuko Yena,

Yes, it is possible to extract only tables using Azure AI Document Intelligence.

Azure AI Document Intelligence provides multiple models to analyze documents, such as:

·       Prebuilt Layout Model

·       Prebuilt Document Model

·       Custom Models

To extract only tables, you should use the Layout Model, which is designed for this purpose.

What it does:

·       Extracts text lines

·       Extracts tables (structure + cell content)

·       Extracts selection marks (checkboxes)

 It does not extract key-value pairs or entities — perfect if you're only focused on layout elements like tables.

To Use (via REST API / SDKs / Azure Portal)

Example using Python SDK:

from azure.ai.formrecognizer import DocumentAnalysisClient
from azure.core.credentials import AzureKeyCredential

endpoint = "https://.cognitiveservices.azure.com/"
key = ""

document_analysis_client = DocumentAnalysisClient(
    endpoint=endpoint, credential=AzureKeyCredential(key)
)

# Use layout model
poller = document_analysis_client.begin_analyze_document(
    "prebuilt-layout", document=open("your_file.pdf", "rb")
)
result = poller.result()

# Extract tables only
for table in result.tables:
    print(f"\nTable with {table.row_count} rows and {table.column_count} columns")
    for cell in table.cells:
        print(f"Cell [{cell.row_index}, {cell.column_index}] - content: '{cell.content}'")

Hope this helps. Do let me know if you any further queries.


If this answers your query, do click Accept Answer and Yes for was this answer helpful. And, if you have any further query do let us know.

Thank you!  

2 of 2
1

Hey Luzuko Yena,

Thanks for asking on Microsoft Q&A!

You can pull tables using Azure AI Document Intelligence with the prebuilt-layout model. It grabs tables, text, and other stuff, but there’s no direct way to get only tables from the API. Just take the JSON response and pick out the "tables" section in your code. For example, in Python, you’d grab the rows, columns, and cell data from "tables", skipping everything else.

Hope this does the trick! If it helps, please upvote and mark as accepted. Thanks!

References:

  • Document layout analysis - Document Intelligence
  • Use Document Intelligence client library or REST API
🌐
DEV Community
dev.to › mcombp › extract-table-data-from-documents-using-azure-ai-document-intelligence-1maa
Extract table data from Documents using Azure AI Document Intelligence - DEV Community
October 16, 2024 - Azure AI Document Intelligence is a cloud-based service that allows you to build intelligent document processing solutions. It uses machine learning to extract text, tables, and key-value pairs from documents, providing structured data for easy use.
🌐
Elastic
elastic.co › search-labs › blog › azure-ai-document-intelligence-parse-pdf-text-tables
Azure AI Document Intelligence: Parsing PDF text & table data | Elasticsearch Labs
March 26, 2025 - It can be used to effectively extract text and table data. Once the data is extracted, it can be indexed into Elastic Cloud Serverless to power RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation).
🌐
Azure
contentunderstanding.ai.azure.com › documentintelligence › studio
Document Intelligence Studio - Microsoft Azure
Document Intelligence Studio is an online tool to visually explore, understand, train, and integrate features into your applications. You can easily extract key data from documents or create your own custom models with a no-code approach. Learn more · Extract text, tables, structure, key-value pairs, and named entities from documents.
🌐
Medium
medium.com › @tinkerblogs › automatic-table-extraction-extracting-invoice-tables-with-python-and-azure-ai-document-4a1e816e305e
Automatic Table Extraction: Extracting Invoice Tables with Python and Azure AI Document Intelligence | by Tinker Blogs | Medium
October 8, 2023 - Let’s look at a basic real-world case. Consider you have a PDF invoice and wish to extract a table from it to store in an Excel file. Azure AI Document Intelligence comes to the rescue, especially when dealing with tables that don’t have clear borders. Unlike traditional methods that rely on row-by-row reading, Document Intelligence uses advanced techniques like OCR and pattern recognition to understand the table’s structure.
Find elsewhere
🌐
GitHub
github.com › azure-data-ai-hub › document-intelligence › blob › main › README.md
document-intelligence/README.md at main · azure-data-ai-hub/document-intelligence · GitHub
AZURE_DOCUMENTINTELLIGENCE_ENDPOINT=https://<your-resource>.cognitiveservices.azure.com/ AZURE_DOCUMENTINTELLIGENCE_KEY=<key> python .\src\di_extract_tables.py .\sample.pdf --out output --format both
Author: azure-data-ai-hub
🌐
GitHub
github.com › azure-data-ai-hub › document-intelligence
GitHub - azure-data-ai-hub/document-intelligence · GitHub
AZURE_DOCUMENTINTELLIGENCE_ENDPOINT=https://<your-resource>.cognitiveservices.azure.com/ AZURE_DOCUMENTINTELLIGENCE_KEY=<key> python .\src\di_extract_tables.py .\sample.pdf --out output --format both
Author: azure-data-ai-hub
🌐
Medium
billtcheng2013.medium.com › document-table-extraction-646202a2a12c
Document Table Extraction. To Pandas Dataframe with Azure Document… | by Xin Cheng | Medium
May 22, 2024 - Both extraction result is JSON format. We need to extract useful information to construct Pandas dataframe. Below is the example. ... def convert_azdocintl_todf(azdocintl_tables): tablesCollected = [] for table_idx, table in enumerate(azdoc...
🌐
Microsoft Learn
learn.microsoft.com › en-us › azure › ai-services › document-intelligence › prebuilt › general-document
General key-value extraction - Document Intelligence - Foundry Tools | Microsoft Learn
August 15, 2026 - For Document Intelligence versions v4.0 preview versions and going forward, the general document model (prebuilt-document) is deprecated. To extract key-value pairs, selection marks, text, tables, and structure from documents, use the following models: Note: Azure AI Document Intelligence v3.0 API (2022-08-31) reaches end of support on March 30, 2029.
🌐
Signisys
signisys.com › home › blog › azure ai document intelligence: complete deep dive
Azure AI Document Intelligence: Processing Guide (2026) - Signisys
April 14, 2026 - Azure AI Document Intelligence extracts text, tables, key-value pairs, and structured fields from documents using prebuilt and custom ML models — processing invoices, receipts, IDs, tax forms, and contracts at scale.
🌐
Reddit
reddit.com › r/azure › azure ai document intelligence - how to extract data when item or table is not consistently on the same page???
r/AZURE on Reddit: Azure AI Document Intelligence - how to extract data when item or table is not consistently on the same page???
December 2, 2024 -

Hi all...

I am building a custom extraction model which is based on PDF reports. The first several pages are consistent, and I can repeatedly get the key data from the fields.

However, there is an appendix in each PDF which for example appears on page 20 in one report, but on page 22 on another due to the amount of information that is present in the document in various sections.

To complicate the matter further this appendix is often running over several pages.

When training the model fails to find the appendix in any of the cases. I'm guessing this is because I am assigning a field to page 20 in one document and page 22 in another??? Is there a method of having the appendix identified without the page number being considered?

Tony

🌐
Microsoft Azure
azure.microsoft.com › en-us › pricing › details › document-intelligence
Pricing - Azure Document Intelligence in Foundry Tools | Microsoft Azure
Custom Field Extraction – Document Intelligence learns the structure of your documents (invoices, contracts, statements, industry specific records) to intelligently extract fields, text and data.
🌐
Azure Docs
docs.azure.cn › en-us › ai-services › document-intelligence › prebuilt › layout
Document layout analysis - Document Intelligence - Azure AI services | Azure Docs
Extract text, tables, selections, titles, section headings, page headers, page footers, and more with the layout analysis model from Document Intelligence.
🌐
Microsoft Learn
learn.microsoft.com › en-us › azure › ai-services › document-intelligence
Document Intelligence documentation - Quickstarts, Tutorials, API Reference - Foundry Tools | Microsoft Learn
Azure Document Intelligence in Foundry Tools is a cloud-based Microsoft Foundry tool that uses machine-learning models to extract key-value pairs, text, and tables from your documents.
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Microsoft Learn
learn.microsoft.com › en-us › training › modules › extract-data-with-document-intelligence
Extract data with Azure Document Intelligence - Training | Microsoft Learn
Azure Document Intelligence uses OCR and deep learning models to extract text, key-value pairs, tables, and structured data from forms and documents.
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Microsoft Learn
learn.microsoft.com › en-us › azure › ai-services › document-intelligence › overview
What Is Azure Document Intelligence in Foundry Tools? - Foundry Tools | Microsoft Learn
September 8, 2026 - Azure Document Intelligence applies optical character recognition (OCR) based on machine learning along with document understanding technologies to extract text, tables, structure, and key/value pairs from documents.
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Matthew Devaney
matthewdevaney.com › home › power automate › how to extract tables from a pdf in power automate
How To Extract Tables From A PDF In Power Automate
November 13, 2025 - Power Automate can extract tables from a PDF with the help of Azure AI Document Intelligence. Using the pre-built Layout model we can analyze any PDF document and get its information in a JSON.