It seems that Excel ain't doing that good a job of importing an adding machine tape PDF.
And I'm worried about this 'cause accountants use adding machine tapes all the time.
The bottom line was that it couldn't be imported into Excel (Get data, From file, From PDF).
Why is this?
It seems like a straightforward PDF.
Your PDF file is just one image. I'm not sure what you expect to happen if you import that to Excel.
I was expecting Excel to convert it to an Excel spreadsheet.
Should I have OCR'd the PDF first?
In all the videos that I've seen on Excel getting data from PDFs it never mentioned that the PDF should be OCR'd.
Even after OCR'ing the PDF, it still can't be imported into Excel
Your second file is still just an image. It looks just like the first file.
Excel doesn't automatically OCR images when you import a PDF. It only deals with data.
Excel 365 claims to be able to import an image file (not a PDF file containing pictures) and convert it to data. I converted your image to a JPG and tried to import to Excel but got junk as a result.
If you have the tools to OCR your image first, that is going to give you the most reliable results.
Values as displayed
Page001
You can do it with Google Translate | Images. You need to get a jpg from the content of the PDF. One way to do that is open the PDF in Acrobat. Then use Shift-Windows Key-S to get a screen print of the page. Then in Google Translate, select Images and paste the screen print into the translate window. You might have to select the numbers again and drag them to the Text window. From there, you can copy and paste the text.
See attached.
Last edited by TMS; 03-20-2024 at 11:01 AM.
Trevor Shuttleworth - Retired Excel/VBA Consultant
I dream of a better world where chickens can cross the road without having their motives questioned
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I tried this with my own OCR tool. The resolution of the tape isn't great. I could get no meaningful results from it. It read the decimal points as midline dots or hyphens because they are printed midline on the tape instead of at the baseline, and read the commas as various other symbols. I think you would need a really good OCR tool to extract data out of this.
Missing attachmentOriginally Posted by TMS
Oops. There now. Missed the fact that it complained the size was too large.
It's a bit of a messy process. Also uses Google Lens. Think I need to practice before I can fully document the steps.
Thanks for the responses, but I think going to chalk this one up to it just can't be done.
I simply thought that when Excel could read or import PDF files, something as simple as an adding machine tape that was scan to PDF would be one of the ideal PDF documents scan.
But alas, it just wasn't meant to be
The fact that it's in a PDF file is beside the point. It's an image, and Excel's ability to "read" an image is limited.
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