Thread: export to excel

I want to export a large table from a PDF file into excel 2007. However, I can not determine how to accomplisht this goal. Can you tell me how to accomplish this task?

Does your PDF reader recognize the table as text, or does it only see it as a picture? Assuming it can recognize it as text, here's what I've done:

1) Select the table and copy to the clipboard
2) Select a cell in Excel and paste the text into Excel
3) Run the "Text to Columns" command to parse the resulting data into cells. Exactly how this will work will depend on how the data is formatted in the original table, how the copy and paste commands interpret carriage returns.

When the data is fairly "clean" so that each row parses the same way, this usually works fairly easily. When the data is messy (each row looks different, or characters get jumbled), it can be more difficult. Sometimes I will paste the data into a text editor (like notepad) to clean it up before copying into Excel.

In an attempt to solve my problem, here are a few comments and two responses to your answer:

1. The pdf table that I want to work with is in a users manual from my company's main customer. This user manual has page headers and page footers in it. The customer said the only way I will get the data for the work I need to complete is to convert the 297 pages from their pdf document to excel for me to work with. The table I want to work with is in the middle of the customer's user manual.
2. I work some a small company that does not have a budget for buying adobe acrobat. It looks like adobe acrobat would pull out all the tables I want to access easily.
I have tried a few free online websites that convert a pdf file to excel, but they do not work. Do you know of any free website where I it would complete my goal of converting a pdf file to excel?
3. In reposne to your answer, yes I can save my pdf file as a ''text' file. However since the table I want is embedded in a pdf document that has page headers and page footers, would that make a difference to what you ae suggesting?
4. 'Run the "Text to Columns" command to parse the resulting data into cells', can you tell me how to run the 'text to columns' command. What do you do to complete this task? Does this involve VBA?
5. The only solution that I found that works but is a bad option is the following:
I select the part of the table I want for each page. (I need to repeat this process 297 times). I hit control c, I then have a word 2007 document and do a control v into the word document. From the word document I select what I just pasted into it, I then do a contol c from the word document into the excel 2007 excel sheet. I then do a control v into the excel document and that page of the data is formatted correctly.

2. I work some a small company that does not have a budget for buying adobe acrobat. It looks like adobe acrobat would pull out all the tables I want to access easily.

Every version of the free Acrobat Reader (that I've seen) since about 4.0 has had some variation on a "text select" tool that allows a user to select text and copy it to the clipboard. I see no reason why you should need to purchase a full license to acrobat for this.

3. In reposne to your answer, yes I can save my pdf file as a ''text' file. However since the table I want is embedded in a pdf document that has page headers and page footers, would that make a difference to what you ae suggesting?

Not really. After the text is imported into Excel, I might go through and delete the rows containing the headers, footers, and other unwanted text. But the idea would still be the same.

4. 'Run the "Text to Columns" command to parse the resulting data into cells', can you tell me how to run the 'text to columns' command. What do you do to complete this task? Does this involve VBA?

No VBA. It is a command in Excel that opens the "import text" wizard. I don't know where they hid the command on the ribbon in the newer versions (I'm sure someone here does). On my older version, it is under the Data menu.