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.


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19 comments:

  1. acrobat_userJanuary 16, 2010 at 4:07 AM

    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

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousFebruary 11, 2010 at 5:14 PM

    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.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousAugust 23, 2010 at 6:57 AM

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

    i love bloggers

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousOctober 23, 2010 at 7:48 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousDecember 7, 2010 at 4:44 AM

    Awesome Man...Thanks for this..

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousMarch 16, 2011 at 11:55 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
  7. HairyLeeApril 21, 2011 at 9:28 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
  8. AdityaMay 19, 2011 at 6:38 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
  9. AnonymousAugust 2, 2011 at 1:47 PM

    Thanks a ton!!!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Sandeep GargeyaAugust 11, 2011 at 9:01 AM

    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

    ReplyDelete
  11. David RAugust 25, 2011 at 3:34 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
  12. David RAugust 25, 2011 at 3:35 AM

    Thank you. It was helpful.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Engico_SpidyOctober 13, 2011 at 10:15 AM

    Awesome. This works :)

    ReplyDelete
  14. John BroughtonNovember 21, 2011 at 10:50 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
  15. journeymanNovember 29, 2011 at 7:50 AM

    wonderful, this was a tremendous help. thx a lot

    ReplyDelete
  16. Partizan CrivăţDecember 14, 2011 at 6:55 AM

    many thanx really usefull

    ReplyDelete
  17. BernieDecember 14, 2011 at 12:37 PM

    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

    ReplyDelete
  18. AamirMay 16, 2012 at 3:24 PM

    It really worked. Thanks!!

    ReplyDelete
  19. Pavan CSeptember 23, 2013 at 5:40 AM

    Thanks a lot.. saved me a lot of efforts

    ReplyDelete