unruly formatting

[duncanj21]

I am attempting to get a paper copy of a spreadsheet into Excel.

I have OCR'd to adobe .pdf to as satisfactory degree of accuracy - the odd B is an 8 but beyond that it's ok. I exported the .pdf to plain text, converted to table in word, and now I'm confronted with an excel sheet that's completely unmanageable! cells that contained more than one word have been divided up, some have been run together, and things are moved out of their home columns.

I need to extract the following data:

2 columns of 4-character text strings
1 column of dates

After a whole afternoon experimenting with VLookup, IF, LEN, EXACT etc, I am reaching my wits' end. please help me.

[Doug Kanter]

"duncanj21" <[email protected]> wrote in
message news:[email protected]...
>
> I am attempting to get a paper copy of a spreadsheet into Excel.
>
> I have OCR'd to adobe .pdf to as satisfactory degree of accuracy - the
> odd B is an 8 but beyond that it's ok. I exported the .pdf to plain
> text, converted to table in word, and now I'm confronted with an excel
> sheet that's completely unmanageable! cells that contained more than
> one word have been divided up, some have been run together, and things
> are moved out of their home columns.
>
> I need to extract the following data:
>
> 2 columns of 4-character text strings
> 1 column of dates
>
> After a whole afternoon experimenting with VLookup, IF, LEN, EXACT etc,
> I am reaching my wits' end. please help me.


Is there a way, in Word, to save nice neat columns as delimited text? That
means the columns will be separated by commas or some other character. Your
OCR software may even be able to produce that format, skipping the pdf step
entirely. Look for terms like "csv file". If you can produce such a file,
Excel can import it very easily into neat columns. It only gets twitchy if
your data contains commas, which throws things off. Then, you simply use a
character other than commas to be the delimiter.