I have been asked about exporting the information from an Acrobat file into Excel. Can it be done.
The files contains statistical data.
However the Columns to rows option in Excel will not set the data out correctly.
I do not usually use Acrobat, so I don't know much about the topic.
Can anybody help?
Stuart Dray
3 Responses
Copy & paste?
Hi Stuart,
I think the only way is to use the text select tool in Adobe Acrobat and then to copy and paste into Excel.
Unfortunately this will not preserve the formatting and I’m not sure it will recognise the column breaks – it may just paste it all into one column (although it should recognise the different rows OK)
I hope this helps!
Kind regards,
Colin Hamilton
email: colin@bis-improve.co.uk
web: http://www.bis-improve.co.uk
It’s tricky
Try:
http://tdr.tug-libraries.on.ca/HELPS/pdftablehelp.html
http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/census2/excel/pdfexcel.doc
http://www.library.mcgill.ca/edrs/services/publications/howto/PDFtoXLS/PDFtoExcel.html
Acrobat 6.0
Acrobat 6.0 Professional (only released a couple of days ago) makes it dead easy, provided the PDF is not protected. It allows you to save a PDF as a Word document or as HTML, either of which will preserve the table structure. You can then just cut and paste into Excel.
I’m pretty sure that Acrobat 5 also allowed you to save as HTML, though not as Word.