Wednesday, September 2, 2009

How to Copy PDF Table to Excel

I have a pdf file with a bunch of tables that I need to grab the content of and paste into an excel spreadsheet. One way to do this is to upgrade to Adobe Acrobat Professional and use the copy as table command. Who wants, or is able, to pay $450 for that though? Certainly not me.
Adobe Reader is free and came installed on my computer, so I was poking around a bit and discovered a work around. In Adobe Reader 7.0, first make sure the select tool is chosen. Next, move the cursor over the column header until a rectangle appears. Then highlight the column elements and press Ctrl+C to copy the column elements, paste into Excel with Ctrl+V.
If you are using Adobe Reader 9.0, press Ctrl+Alt while moving the cursor over the column header until a rectangle appears. Then highlight the column elements and press Ctrl+C to copy the column elements, paste into Excel with Ctrl+V.
Copying each column one at a time isn't quite as nice as the copy as table command. It takes a little bit more time, but it is definitely better than spending a couple hundred dollars if you really don't need to.


More Adobe Acrobat

19 comments:

acrobat_user said...

wow! IT WORKS!!!

Thanks a lot, saved me from a lot of work and from 300 bucks as well (in the long run).



BR
Sander

Anonymous said...

unfortunately doesn't work across page breaks. agh. why hasn't msft destroyed adobe by now, eh?? feels like this uninteroperability has survived longer than platypi.

Anonymous said...

Thanks heaps u just saved me hours of work for uni.

i love bloggers

Anonymous said...

You rock. Great tip. Simple and effective. Does exactly what I needed.

Anonymous said...

Awesome Man...Thanks for this..

Anonymous said...

OMG!
u are gr8
solved such a big prob
thanks sooo much
Rose

HairyLee said...

Thanks for that tip, that saved me loads of re-typing :)

Aditya said...

Awesome !!! Thanks a lot...
I can do my work very fast now...

Anonymous said...

Thanks a ton!!!

Sandeep Gargeya said...

Thanks a lot for this, this prevented me from copying the entire thing and then splitting them as text into columns.

BTW, just pressing alt and dragging a box is sufficent to select the column.

Sandeep

David R said...

Thanks. Spared me time and money. Keep it up.

David R said...

Thank you. It was helpful.

Engico_Spidy said...

Awesome. This works :)

John Broughton said...

Wow, how useful! On the Mac, it's [command]+[option] rather than [control}+[alt], but that was easy to figure out.

journeyman said...

wonderful, this was a tremendous help. thx a lot

Partizan Crivăţ said...

many thanx really usefull

Bernie said...

Using this techniques does not work for me. I'm using Acrobat 9 Pro. The copy as table just produces a bitmap in Excel. The save as table and open table in spreadsheet do nothing. I've tried this with Excel 2010 as well as Excel 2000. Any ideas?

BP

Aamir said...

It really worked. Thanks!!

Pavan C said...

Thanks a lot.. saved me a lot of efforts