Copy pdf text to excel

You will benefit much more by discovering your own solutions. Remember, the people on these forums are generally giving their time for free. Use Excel Rescue , who are my consultancy partner.

They help by providing solutions to smaller Excel problems. Rename columns in Power Query when names change. Clear old items from a PivotTable filter list. Why are Excel formulas not calculating? VBA to sort sheets alphabetically. Office Scripts — Sort sheets alphabetically. Use Office Scripts with Power Automate. Office Scripts — Hide all sheets except one. Sandip says: I have a pdf address file that is of the following format.

June 14, at am. Did you try copying it into Word first? Did that give you reasonable results? June 14, at pm. February 19, at pm. Farah says: Thank you very much!

July 18, at pm. Most Excel users, you and me included, found ourselves in the second camp most of the time. We need to work with the data within the PDF file. Therefore, we usually want to have the ability to convert a PDF file to Excel. I assume that you also want to have the ability to convert PDF files to Excel, so let's take a look at some of the most popular methods to bring data from PDF files into Excel :.

The most basic method of bringing data from a PDF file into Excel is to simply copy and paste. Since some not all PDF files allow you to copy data , there are cases where you may be able to bring all the data you require into Excel by using the basic commands of copy and paste. Let's take a look at a practical example of how you can copy and paste data from certain PDF files into Excel:.

The following screenshot shows a table within a pdf document. More precisely, you can find this table in page 22 of the Working Paper from the European Central Bank titled Inflation forecasts: Are market-based and survey-based measures informative? Throughout this blog post, I show the results obtained when applying each of the different methods to convert this table from PDF to Excel.

You can get immediate free access to this example workbook by subscribing to the Power Spreadsheets Newsletter. The first step to copy data from a PDF file is to, simply, select the relevant data and copy it.

Once you've copied the relevant data from the PDF file, and this is available on the Clipboard, you need to go to Excel and paste it. Even though this sounds easy, in practice it doesn't work that smoothly. In fact, this step highlights some of the main limitations of this method of converting PDF files to Excel. In the Paste Special dialog box, you can choose from several options.

The following image shows how the Paste Special dialog box looks like when I paste the data from the PDF table that appears above:. For this example, I select the option to paste as Text and click on the OK button on the lower-right corner of the dialog box. In most cases this isn't precisely the result you want. However, you'll rarely be able to get better results when using this method. As a general rule: Directly copying and pasting from PDF to Excel usually results in a single column of data.

This is precisely what happens in the example above. And you can generally expect this to happen whenever following this method. As a consequence of the above, you'll usually need to complete the process with the following….

Even though pasted data in Excel generally requires some cleanup, you have a variety of tools you can use to make the cleanup easier, faster and more precise. Since this blog post isn't about data cleanup, I don't go into any specific methods. However, some of the tools and features that you may find helpful depending on the particular situation are the following:.

I may cover some of these topics in future tutorials within Power Spreadsheets. If you want to receive an email when I publish new material in Power Spreadsheets, please make sure to register to our Newsletter by entering your email address below:. Overall, this first method of converting a PDF file to Excel leaves some things to be desired. The following are, in my opinion, its 2 biggest drawbacks:.

There are some situations in which you may not have any other option for purposes of converting a PDF file to Excel. This is the case if, for example, you don't have access to any of the tools that are required to apply the other methods that I explain below.

In any case, as long as you have access to a recent version of Microsoft Word or to Word Online, the following method may help you achieve better results when converting a PDF file to Excel. In broad terms, the logic behind converting a PDF file to Excel is the same regardless of which of the above versions of Word you use. You, basically, follow these 2 simple steps :.

In both cases, I use the same sample table as above, which you can find in page 22 of the Working Paper from the European Central Bank titled Inflation forecasts: Are market-based and survey-based measures informative? You can open the PDF file you want to convert using any of several methods , including the following After you've asked Word to open the file, a dialog box such as the one below is displayed.

This dialog box informs you about the following:. As mentioned above, the conversion may take a while, so you may have to wait a little before proceeding to the next step. Once you've completed step 1 and if necessary step 2 above, Word displays the original PDF file as an editable Word document.

When you have the editable Word document, select the section that you want to take into Excel. In the example below, I select the same table as in the previous method:.

Once you've selected the relevant information in the editable Word document, copy it. For these purposes, you can use any of the following methods:. By now, you have the information you need in an editable format. Therefore, you can go to Excel and paste it by using, among others, any of the following methods:. In some cases, including this example, the conversion from PDF to Excel isn't perfect. Notice, for example, how Word hasn't been able to convert the values in the first section of the table Mean error to an editable form.

In this case, those values are pasted as an image. Therefore, you must use another method including those described in this Excel tutorial to bring them into Excel before being able to work with them. Click the table you want to copy from the PDF to Excel. Click Load. Did this summary help you? Yes No. Log in Social login does not work in incognito and private browsers. Please log in with your username or email to continue. No account yet? Create an account. Edit this Article. We use cookies to make wikiHow great.

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Related Articles. Article Summary. You can open a new project or continue a saved project in Excel. You'll also need to know where in the PDF your table is so when you're importing it, you'll be able to find it easily. This will be the top left corner of the table you're copying from the PDF. It's in the menu above the editing ribbon next to File and Review.