The pharmaceutical industry uses a lot of data. Consequently, we see a lot of tabular data converted to PDF documents. It is common to see lab instrument data, database reports and enterprise systems data output as PDF.
So, there you are, alone in your office staring at a PDF document wishing you had access to the original data. What do you do?
Fortunately, Acrobat 9.1 offers a couple of different ways to export to Excel.
- Select table and open in Excel
This allows you to select a portion of a page and open it in Excel.
- Export as Tables in Excel
This method uses some artificial intelligence to convert multiple page PDF documents to multiple worksheets in an XML-based spreadsheet file. It works best on files which were converted directly from Excel to PDF.
To open the XML-based file output generated using method 2 above, you'll need either:
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Acrobat generally will usually do a pretty good job converting the text, but formatting and column widths will look different than the original. Acrobat only copies over the text. Formulas will not convert. Do not expect 100% fidelity.
In the full article, you'll receive my usual step-by-step instructions.