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Exporting a PDF to Excel

By Rick Borstein

I received this email from a paralegal at a large law firm recently:

Help! An attorney has asked me to convert PDFs we received in discovery to Excel. The PDFs are tabular in nature (probably originated in Excel). Some are scanned in from paper and others appear to be converted electronically. How do I do this?

Fortunately, Acrobat 9.1 offers a couple of different ways to export to Excel.

1. Select table and open in Excel
   This allows you to select a portion of a page and open it in Excel.
   - Works best when you only need small part of the table
   - Better results if the file didn't originate from a spreadsheet
2. 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: Office 2007 The free Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats for earlier versions of Office.

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.

Full post as published by Acrobat for Legal Professionals on April 07, 2009 (boomark / email).