Excel Worksheet Tips: Table from PDF to Excel

Excel Worksheet Tips: Table from PDF to Excel

At work today, I was asked if there was a way to extract the data from a table in a PDF in Adobe Reader and paste it into an excel workbook. You can, if you have the expensive adobe acrobat version; however, for the rest of us, there seemed to be no way to pull the data in without a row of data appearing in a single cell.

However, I stumbled upon this post which describes the way to grab a single column at a time.

Adobe Reader 7.x

1. Choose the select tool.
2. Move the cursor over the column header until a rectangle appears.
3. Highlight the column elements and press Ctrl+C to copy the column elements.
4. Paste into Excel with Ctrl+V.

Adobe Reader 9.x
1. Choose the select tool.
2. Press Ctrl+Alt while moving the cursor over the column header until a rectangle appears.
3. Highlight the column elements and press Ctrl+C to copy the column elements.
4. Paste into Excel with Ctrl+V.

Hopefully this helps solve the issue a little. Quite annoying this is not a standard feature.

Come check out the directory for the rest of my excel tips!

Submeg

IT