Pasting reports from PDF to Excel (Office 2000)

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Hello. Our users have to paste a lot of reports from PDF docs to Excel. The best (but not so quick) method we’ve found is to have them use the column select tool. We wondered however if there’s a quicker way to do this (be able to select a whole table at once, and paste it into Excel so that it’s automatically divided into the same type of columns that it had in the PDF. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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Are you making the PDF’s yourself?

Cheers

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The PDF documents are somehow generated from a Peoplesoft report. I don’ t know any more details. I learned today that if you have the full version of Acrobat 5.0, there is a table select tool, but I cannot guarantee that our users have the full version. So, I wondered if anyone has found a way to push content into Excel from Reader 5.0, in an efficient way.
Thank you.

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The best I can do for you is to suggest that you save the PDF as an .rtf file, but you will need permission in Acrobat to do so – you may need to talk to the person generating these files.
Open in Word, replace the spaces between cells with tabs. You can then copy/paste directly from Word into Excel. Perhaps one could do something more within Acrobat itself – but this is the first thing I’ve come across..

Cheers

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Acrobat does not do a very good job of saving PDF as RTF.

You could purchase other software, such as OmniPage Pro, which may do a better job of converting PDF to RTF.

Or, you could save the PDF pages as, say, TIFF, or JPEG or … images and insert those images into Excel..

Or you can use Acrobat and manually Copy and Paste into Excel.

Or, if the documents were originally created in Word, you could use macros to Copy and Paste stuff into Excel.

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Can you get whoever is sending you the pdf to export the reports into Excel for you and distribute them to you in that format, or am I oversimplifying the issue?

– Brett

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I tested that with my copy of Acrobat – it doesn’t have an export to Excel feature .

Cheers

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I actually meant can the reports be output to Excel from Peoplesoft? I don’t know anything about Peoplesoft, but if you can export to PDF, it’s possible there’s more than one option for exporting reports…

>>The PDF documents are somehow generated from a Peoplesoft report. I don’ t know any more details.<<

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I know zip about peoplesoft .

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Although I have not done this, I know that our Finance people routinely get output from PeopleSoft directly into Excel. So I would recommend contacting those who provide the data and determine how they can provide Excel (or even CSV) files for your work.

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Yes, I check with our Finance people today. Whoever sets up the database in Peoplesoft can program it to automatically output to Excel files.

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