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How to Copy PDF Table to Excel

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zofxare
in,,,,

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

Comments

  1. acrobat_user Avatar
    acrobat_user

    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

  2. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    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.

  3. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

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

    i love bloggers

  4. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

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

  5. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Awesome Man…Thanks for this..

  6. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

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

  7. HairyLee Avatar
    HairyLee

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

  8. Aditya Avatar
    Aditya

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

  9. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Thanks a ton!!!

  10. Sandeep Gargeya Avatar
    Sandeep Gargeya

    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

  11. David R Avatar
    David R

    Thank you. It was helpful.

  12. David R Avatar
    David R

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

  13. Engico_Spidy Avatar
    Engico_Spidy

    Awesome. This works 🙂

  14. John Broughton Avatar
    John Broughton

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

  15. journeyman Avatar
    journeyman

    wonderful, this was a tremendous help. thx a lot

  16. Bernie Avatar
    Bernie

    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

  17. Partizan Crivăţ Avatar
    Partizan Crivăţ

    many thanx really usefull

  18. Aamir Avatar
    Aamir

    It really worked. Thanks!!

  19. Pavan C Avatar
    Pavan C

    Thanks a lot.. saved me a lot of efforts

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