Being a regular Excel user implies coping with table structures and pie charts for the sake of better data visualization. No matter what type of data you are working with and what its purpose is for you, business or personal, being skilled at making functional Excel tables can make your job or personal life easier, and your data neater and better organized. Working with Excel spreadsheets is usually closely related to working with PDF files – as you all know, the PDF format can be the right choice if you want to preserve your data and not worry if the person you want to send your worksheets to will accidentally alter important information from your document. That being said, your Excel skills alone are not enough, and sooner or later you will need to put your PDF conversion skills to test.
Converting PDF to Excel is probably something you may have some experience with, as there are quite a lot of PDF conversion tools on the market that actually do the job instead of you. But, you cannot expect those tools to help you in every situation, especially when you are dealing with complex PDF tables or you want to extract only a specific table from your PDF. In that case, you will need to learn this extra skill – data extraction. Are you ready?
The first step – install PDF Converter on your computer
To learn how to extract table from a PDF, you will need to download PDF Converter Elite 4 and start the program once it is installed. Click on the Open icon on the menu bar, or go to the tab File and then Open. Browse the PDF you want to edit.
Is it a native or scanned PDF?
If the PDF document you want to convert to Excel is a native PDF, just move on to the next step, but if you’re dealing with a scanned PDF, first turn on the OCR engine by following these steps: go to the Edit tab > OCR Options > tick Convert Using OCR.
What’s next?
Click on the Excel button on the menu or go to Convert tab and choose PDF to Excel conversion. On the right side of the screen, a panel will pop up giving you an option to choose between three different selection preferences. In this case, you need to choose the Select Area option. Then highlight the table you want to edit in Excel as shown in the image below.
What to expect?
Once you click on the yellow Convert button and choose the location where you will save your conversion result, you will get an extracted table in Excel.
This feature may come in handy when you deal with very large PDFs with a lot of tables and you don’t need all the tables, just a particular one.
After learning this PDF to Excel conversion tip, you will never again have to worry about this particular aspect of document editing.