Converting PDF to Excel. OMG! Several of my clients have needed critical information that was locked in a PDF file. Maybe they wanted to sort thousands of entries by zip code, # of employees, square-footage or by industry.
No-can-do in a PDF!
There are lots of PDF to Excel converters available and that’s the good news. Yes! You can get the information out. And do it quite easily. The bad news: none are perfect. They often output a mess. But at least the mess is editable.
I use several converters and use them all when converting a PDF for the first time. From there, I determine which one can be manipulated most directly into a usable Excel format, given my client’s needs. And that’s when the real work begins. Then you’re using
OFFSET, LOOKUP, IF , LEFT, RIGHT, MID, LEN, CHAR*
and other functions in Excel to flag, move and parse the data into useful condition.
So, be wary if you go looking around at PDF converters. Don’t expect any single one to consistently output a pristine document.
Go forth people and keep that data clean!!!!
* The Flash Fill enhancement in Excel 15 will make this much easier.
Have you tried using One Drive to convert a PDF into Excel?
It is not perfect though, the result is not bad indeed.
http://wmfexcel.com/2015/08/08/convert-pdf-to-excel-without-pdf-converter/
FYI: I’ve got more than 10 notification emails from “WordPress” new posts within 10 mins last night… I guess there might be something wrong. One of those mails takes me to this post by the way. 🙂
wmfexcel Thanks for linking to your blogpost. It was pretty cool to see that Word in 2013 is able to open PDFs, and it does a pretty good job.
Sorry about the notices. The site is being fixed and old content is being moved around. There shouldn’t be any more notifications.