Ice Princess's Tech Tips: How to Copy PDF Table to Excel

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; January 16, 2010 at 4:07 AM
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.; February 11, 2010 at 5:14 PM
Anonymous said...: Thanks heaps u just saved me hours of work for uni.

i love bloggers; August 23, 2010 at 6:57 AM
Anonymous said...: You rock. Great tip. Simple and effective. Does exactly what I needed.; October 23, 2010 at 7:48 AM
Anonymous said...: Awesome Man...Thanks for this..; December 7, 2010 at 4:44 AM
Anonymous said...: OMG!
u are gr8
solved such a big prob
thanks sooo much
Rose; March 16, 2011 at 11:55 AM
HairyLee said...: Thanks for that tip, that saved me loads of re-typing :); April 21, 2011 at 9:28 AM
Aditya said...: Awesome !!! Thanks a lot...
I can do my work very fast now...; May 19, 2011 at 6:38 AM
Anonymous said...: Thanks a ton!!!; August 2, 2011 at 1:47 PM
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; August 11, 2011 at 9:01 AM
David R said...: Thanks. Spared me time and money. Keep it up.; August 25, 2011 at 3:34 AM
David R said...: Thank you. It was helpful.; August 25, 2011 at 3:35 AM
Engico_Spidy said...: Awesome. This works :); October 13, 2011 at 10:15 AM
John Broughton said...: Wow, how useful! On the Mac, it's [command]+[option] rather than [control}+[alt], but that was easy to figure out.; November 21, 2011 at 10:50 AM
journeyman said...: wonderful, this was a tremendous help. thx a lot; November 29, 2011 at 7:50 AM
Partizan Crivăţ said...: many thanx really usefull; December 14, 2011 at 6:55 AM
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; December 14, 2011 at 12:37 PM
Aamir said...: It really worked. Thanks!!; May 16, 2012 at 3:24 PM
Pavan C said...: Thanks a lot.. saved me a lot of efforts; September 23, 2013 at 5:40 AM