How to Convert Adobe Professional 8 Files to Excel

A lot of useful information is distributed in PDF format, often with tables of data in it. Getting that table data into a spreadsheet for further analysis can involve re-keying, which is tedious and prone to generating errors. Fortunately, if you have Acrobat Professional and a PDF that contains text, rather than a scanned graphic of a table, you have a few options open to you for converting the Acrobat file to Excel for further manipulation or analysis.

Things You'll Need

• Adobe Acrobat Professional
• Notepad or another text editor
• Excel or another spreadsheet

Instructions

1. Open the PDF file in Acrobat Professional.

2. Select the "Text" tool, and use it to select the table. Hit "Ctrl+C" to copy it.

3. Open Notepad, and hit "Ctrl+V" to paste the text from the table into it. This will preserve the tabs used internally by Acrobat to make the table columns, and each row of data will appear on its own row.

4. Open Excel and use the "File Import" feature to load the text file. Make sure you select tab delimited text as the type of file to import.

Tips & Warnings

• Depending on the version of Excel you have, you may be able to skip pasting the table into Notepad.

• Later versions of Acrobat have a few more export options that may simplify this process.

References

• Exporting PDF tables for use in Excel