Using PDF is very common, especially when you exchange documents with other people. If you are dealing with data in PDF that requires further analysis in Excel, then you must know how difficult it is to extract spreadsheet data locked in PDF. However, you can still do it by following these easy steps:
First download PDF Converter Elite here (it is available as a 7-day free trial) and when you start a program, click on the Open icon to open the PDF you want to convert to Excel. If your PDF is native, just click on the Excel button on the menu, and if it is a scanned PDF, apply the following:
Click on the Edit tab on the navigation bar and from the drop down menu access OCR Options. Instead of Default, tick the Convert using OCR option.
Okay, now take a look at the right side of the program. A panel has opened, so you can choose among the Select options. You can select the whole document, just specific pages or a particular area of the document as shown in the image below.
Then click the Advanced Options button and customization of your PDF can start.
There are a lot of options to choose from that can help you personalize your spreadsheet data locked in PDF. If you don’t want to personalize the whole document, just enter the range of the pages you want to include. You can also customize only the current page by ticking the Only current page box at the bottom of this panel. As you can see from the images below, you can add/remove tables/columns/rows. If you mess up the table settings, don’t worry, just click Replot and start over.
As for columns, you can decide how you want to split them: always, never, only between two words, or split them only if there are 2 or 3 spaces between words.
When you personalize rows, tick the Show Rows box in order to see how the changes look. You can also tick Manual Row Editing if you want to set rows manually.
In the end, edit the header or footer by clicking the Settings button as shown in the image above. You can enable or disable both header and footer.
When you are done, just tick the Show Preview box and see what you have done. If you are still not satisfied, you can continue editing your PDF, and when you finish, click on the Convert button to get a personalized Excel spreadsheet extracted from PDF.
