export to excel

Hi uciltas,

In Acrobat 8 there is a new command that allows you to select a table with the Select tool and from a context menu select a menu command: Open Table in Spreadsheet. This will open the table in a new Excel worksheet.

Hope this helps,
Lori

Lori,
I have Acrobat 8 and I'm trying to export to excel. Can you be more specific on the steps to do export. I'm not sure where the select tool is.....beginner.

Just thought I would add my 2 cents for you. I get lots of requests from my boss to convert extensive PDF's back to Excel. I purchased a program called Able2Extract that does conversions to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML and they come out beautifully.

Yes i got the same problem like uciltas.
i've already done all the step, but it only can work for the first page only.
i try to extract into separated pages, it still only work only at the first page.
HELP!!!

Use Acrobat Pro 8 with all updates.
Go to a single page continuous view.
View > Page Display > Single Page Continuous
Drop the document zoom low, say 25%. This makes the area you must select smaller.
View > Zoom > Zoom To - enter zoom value > OK
Make the Select Tool active
Tools > Select & Zoom > Select Tool
With the Select Tool, select the first page.
Top left to bottom right.
Place cursor (still having Select Tool active) on high lighted content in a cell on page 1.
Right click with mouse. The Context menu is presented.
--| Context Menu choices
--| Copy
--| Copy with Formatting
--| Copy As Table
--| Save As Table
--| Open Table in Spreadsheet
--| Select All
--| Deselect All
--| 5 entries associated with Comments
--| Add Bookmark
Select Open Table in Spreadsheet.
A *csv file is created by Excel.
or
Select Copy as Table, Paste copied content into Excel cell.
Repeat for each page. Use Excel to aggregate the pages.
Save to *xls file.
Slow? Yes, but my thought is...
I do not have to purchase more software & this is better than printing the PDF and re-typing the data into Excel.I have tried, on multi-page PDF from Excel, to select all pages.
That works. However, only the page in which I place the cursor (in order
to get to the context menu) goes to the Excel *.csv file.
A plus, as long as a number of pages are selected, you can
process each in turn rather than have to recommence selection for each page.

It works quite well, one page at a time.

Wow.. It’s really works.
Thank you very much, daka630.
At first, I didn't succeed, because i try to save all pages as a table.
But when I do it one by one, its paste easily into excel.
Maybe it also because I just downloaded the latest update for Acrobat 8 Professional.

I tried that and I have all the latest updates. Running Acrobat Prof 8.1.2 -

My context menu when I select the text, gives me the following options:

Copy
Replace Text (Enter)
Cross Out Text (Del)
Add Note to Text
Highlight Text
Underline Text

I do not see anywhere it talks about tables and spreadsheets.

Help!

Have you add tag?

http://www.acrobatusers.com/forums/aucbb/viewtopic.php?pid=27261#p27261

read more about tags here

http://www.acrobatusers.com/articles/2006/02/pdf_tags/index.php

Something I just figured out while helping one of my users. The developers at Acrobat are "GENIUSES"... NOT. If you are using the hand as your pointer you will not have the "Open Table in Spreadsheet" option in the context menu. You have to make sure that you are using the arrow and THEN when you right click you will see the "Open Table in Spreadsheet" option. How Adobe expects the average user to be able to figure this out on their own is beyond me. Hope this helps. Have a great day everyone!

Hi,

"Add Tags to Document" is greyed out, so I cannot select it. I am guessing that this means my documant already has tags?

But I do see the option to select or save as table.

What Should I do?

Thanks, in Advance!

here are basics to get you on right track: select/copy/paste from pdf to excel (assuming your pdf is text and not image). with your data pasted to a single column, you will need to use (experiment with) the excel's 'text to columns' tool on the data menu.

see more tips here:
http://www.acrobatusers.com/forums/aucbb/viewtopic.php?id=15149

There is a service available at http://www.reportminers.com/ to convert pdf to excel.

I just bought Acrobat 9 Standard for the sole purpose of exporting pdf file to excel. I've always just used the Reader version.

I've tried to export from pdf to excel using export to XML1.0 and I get an error message that reads" Acrobat was unable to make this document accessible because of the following error: Bad PDF; error in processing fonts. [3] Please note that some pages of this document may have been changed. Because of the failure, you are advised to not save these changes." and a second message that says "Unable to convert untagged document to Tagged PDF."So I tried to tag it by going to Advanced/ Accessibility/Add Tags to document.
I got the same error message on BAD PDF, error in processing fonts.

My second problem is that the view of the pdf file seems messed up. Instead of the usual white background on the document when I am using the Acrobat reader version, I am viewing it with checked gray and white all over the page-making me crossed eyed looking at the document. Is this related to my not being able to export. How to change this back to normal view?

I know this is a lot, but I need your help!

Thanks! :)

Hi,

I am unable to convert one of my pdf files to text or excel. am using Adobe 8.0.1.Have tried all the above methods. Apart from this, can someone please confirm if there is any problem with the attached file as I am able to convert other pdf files to text using the PDF text reader which I downloaded from download.com

Please help.

Can you share your file on Acrobat.com (free service)?

I'd bet the problem file is an image.

I have Adobe Standard on my workstation. When I use that application the Open Table In Excel feature works great. However if I upgrade my Reader to 8.o or 9.0 with Adobe Standard 7.0 still installed the feature goes away.

I need standard 7.0 for making pdfs but Adobe doesn't support it anymore.

I have several files in which I was able to select text with a bounding box and then use the copy as table option in the contextual menu in Adobe Reader 8. I have since upgraded to Adobe Reader 9 and I cannot figure out how to "copy as table" the same text. Did Adobe remove the feature from version 9?

Hello everyone.
Will the method laid out above work for documents scanned as a PDF as well? Our accouting group gets reports from another company as a scanned document. Before we purchase Acrobat 9.0, I wanted to check with the daily users to see if you can export PDF to excel from a scanned document. Any information on this would be greatly appreciated.

~edited for errors~

A scanned image is just that an image. You would need to ODR the image to a PDF of text or image with hidden text.

That is what I had assumed but just wanted to verify. I appreciate your input gkaiseril.

Edited add-on:

The software that has a built in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the Able2Extract and it does work flawlessly ( at least the trial version does :) ). I just wanted to post this if anyone else has the same question as myself.

I'm getting the same Bad PDF error when trying to export or add tags. My pdf file is not a scan, it's a file generated from Crystal Reports, but it does have a small image in the header of each page. Could this be causing the issue? If so, what are my options?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I have also some trouble by exporting my PDF file to excel. I use Acrobat 9 and created a custom form. When this form is filled in by somebody else, I would like to store the PDF files and create an excel file for overview. When I try to export this form to excel the following error occurs: "Save As was unable to find tables in this document. No file was created." This is only happening when I try to export to .xml (tables in excel spreadsheet).

Any thoughts?

Thanks, Luc

Thank you KimMynatt for posting about Able2Extract. I just downloaded it (actually twice - I needed the professional version as it was a scanned document I needed to convert to Excel.) and it was like heaven compared to all the frustrating near missed I dealt with trying to use the features of Acroabat itself.

I tried what the Administrator said to do and it didn't work. What did work was Able2Extract - I HIGHLY recommend it especially in the business environment. It's worth the price!

Karen -
The only solution I got to this problem was to purchase a product called Able2Extract Professional. That was suggested by someone else in this community so all I can say is that to solve your problems, you'll need to purchase it also.

I had the EXACT SAME EXPERIENCE THAT YOU DID as did my colleague. We got our boss to pay for it. Now if you work for yourself, pass the cost on to the cutomer.

Good luck and best wishes.
Cathy in NY.

Hello,

Hopefully someone can help...
When I convert Excel to pdf, the conversion process is successful, however the format in pdf is all messed up...any ideas?
Thank you.
Neil

First posting. I'm not an expert but closing in on it after this project. I've just converted a time series of 31 pdfs x 18 pgs each of tables into excel. I started from scratch (knowledge-wise) and tried several approaches. Nothing worked perfectly but somethings worked well.

First, there was the OCR conversion. I saw that there were editable (not edible) options for doing the OCR. I have a fairly fast computer so I stayed with the 600dpi downsampling (highest quality) but didn't have a clue as to which output style was best (Clearscan, Searchable image or exact). I've tried all 3 and I'm not sure that it matters to OCR. I've since learned that Clearscan is the new embed-the-image-behind-the-text mode, again, not important to OCR. OCR was problem free with only a few spurious characters but fortunately predictable and easy to replace. Also, a few xeroxing artifacts that became comas or hyphens. I thought about doing an "optimize scanned pdf" as a pre-step to OCR but again wasn't sure it mattered.

Exporting. Arrrgh! (not in the elated pirate sense!) It should have been simple. First choice, do it from File Export (whole document) or by the page (right click on selected text). By experience, I think I've figured out that any success depends on how the OCR translated the table format. Often, I would File Export the whole document in some format, note how well it worked and then try another (eg, Word, XML or text). Generally, I ended up doing text which loads into a single column in Excel that must then be Data, Convert data-to-text'd (space delimited format) to spread out the data through the columns. I had no luck with XML although that may be my ignorance/inexperience.

BUT, there was always a degree of failure. Some tables would try to cram themselves onto one or two lines (as if the OCR forgot to put in line returns). So, I'd then highgrade the export, salvaging the correctly formatted tables (pages) and going back to acrobat to re-extract the damaged ones. Back in acrobat, I'd then switch into single page extracts, selecting the entire page (Ctrl-A) and right clicking. Now, there's 3 more options, Copy, Copy as table, or Save in spreadsheet. I used all three. The best would be Save in Spreadsheet whereby the selection appears opened in a new excel file and then I could copy and paste exactly what I was after into the "master compilation" spreadsheet. But it didn't always work (same reason as above). Then I'd try to subselect just the data I was interested in (not the entire page) and either retry the Save as spreadsheet or Copy as table. Often that worked but not always (same reason as above). Final resort, I'd just copy a column of data and paste it into the final spreadsheet. That nearly always worked. But then--here's the workaround--I noticed that when I tried to select data in columns from these funky sheets, the selection highlight would jump columns selecting other data. This symptom is why I think the OCR had trouble recognizing the table format and particularly line returns. Sometimes, I could only cleanly select 5 of 7 columns without grabbing headers, titles, footnotes, etc. Sometimes, only 2 columns. But in all instances where I could get a "clean" selection of table data only, the export, by whatever method, worked. So, then it just became a task of judiciously piecing together column selections to capture the entire table in steps. Sounds tedious (sort of was) but when you're actually making progress, not being frustrated by things that don't work and that you don't understand, and particularly not hand-transcribing ALL those numbers, it's actually satisfying. And only some documents were funky. Some exported cleanly.

So, in summary, OCR the document, File Export what you can (text was my best choice), selectively copy paste or save to spreadsheet to replace the bad sections being very attentive to the integrity of the manual pdf selections. Again, I attribute this to line return misrecognition during table OCR. Any better ideas?

One final note, if you used Clearscan OCR option, watch that you don't select the underlying image layer (the square block highlights rather than the individual text). It won't export. G'luck

When I select a table in a pdf file in Acrobat 9 Pro and then right click and choose "open table in spreadsheet" nothing happens. I am using Office 2007. Why isn't a .csv file being created. I tried it with Excel open and closed and no table is created. If I select the table area ,choose copy and then paste into Excel the data is transferred as unformatted text. I would like to get it into Excel as a table.
What am I missing?

I see I'm still subscribed to this line so I'll jump back in again. First, I have no answer for the frustrated Petegix; I'm not an expert. But, from my experience (see above), I think that the more you know about your source document, the better prepared you'll be to understand the "flaws" in the export process. Following that logic, when you select from a page in the pdf, does it select all things cleanly and in an orderly manner. That'll tell you how acrobat understands the page structure and how it's applied the OCR (presumably your document is, in fact, OCR'd??). The link with Excel is also a mystery to me. I wouldn't necessarily assume it's CSV; Excel takes a lot of data links. Will another pdf export to this Excel? Can you copy/paste to excel? Sorry if this sounds patronizing, I guess I'm just describing basic troubleshooting, eliminating options to see where the issue starts. Can you get another fresh copy of the pdf to test?

may the force be with you...

erh, you can save the table in Excel Spreedsheet as suggested. But I need to make the test about the result later. Another specific way is to convert PDF to Excel by PDF to Excel converter, which would be better. However, there are some different among different products.

Help me !
How to convert Word 2007 to PDF？
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I have acrobat 9 standard and I have tried both suggestions :
Save As the document has 593 pages it gets through first step, but then 2nd step errors when about 60% way through - any other suggestions?