Hi everyone,

I've been given a little (big) task at work. I was given a PDF file containing a lot of information, which has to be somehow transferred into Excel format.

I know I can save the PDF to Word format, and then make it into a tab- or comma-delimited file, then input into Excel, but wondering if there's any smarter/faster way to do this... and especially considering that the file has a fair bit of extraneous/irrelevant data that will have to be removed/edited out.

TiA

P.S. ... in the back of my mind, I'm also wondering if it'd be smarter to use something like Filemaker as the input-to program, rather than Excel... I know Filemaker has very good input data options.

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Freya says, 'Hello from NOLA, baby!' (Laissez bon temps rouler!)

Use Abbyy Finereader to do OCR on the PDF; they have "spreadsheet" as one of the output options.

I find the PC version much better than the Mac version, if you have that option. Both are good for what you want to do.

You can select tables in PDF documents and right-click copy them out to excel... but it never seems to work as well as I think or want it to. May be worth a try, though I'm not sure if it's an option on the mac version of Acrobat or only in Windows.

I've tried a variety of methods on a variety of files and the only thing I've found is that nothing works 100%. I usually end up using a myriad of different techniques on the same file to get to where it needs to be. And the when I get to the next file, it's a completely different set of rules.

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Never underestimate the predictability of stupidity