Manually converting PDF to Excel spreadsheet?

[jent]

I've been terribly let down by the PDF to Excel conversation applications out there, so I decided I might go by hand for an important project of mine. My job is to convert this PDF to an Excel spreadsheet in order to compare that document to other similar ones and detect the differences. If I copy and paste the data on a single page of that PDF into a blank Numbers document, it tries to paste them all into a single column, as seen here. Is there a way I can paste the PDF's content page by page into a Numbers spreadsheet so that it matches the format of the PDF? Thank you!

 

[miles01110]

Make a separate table and format it the way you want using the first "single column" table as the reference values. There's a pattern that shouldn't be too hard to figure out that you can then just drag down to populate the new table.

...at least, that's how I'd do it in Excel. I assume Numbers would have similar functionality.

 

[jent]

Make a separate table and format it the way you want using the first "single column" table as the reference values. There's a pattern that shouldn't be too hard to figure out that you can then just drag down to populate the new table.

...at least, that's how I'd do it in Excel. I assume Numbers would have similar functionality.

Would you mind taking a second to include a screenshot? I filled in a row with column titles and pasted, and they only filled the selected cell. When I highlighted various cells, it only filled the first column's rows.

 

[CylonGlitch]

There is no real easy way to do this, what I ended up doing was taking the PDF table, copying it to the clipboard and then pasting it into excel like you did. Then export excel as a CSV file. Then open the CSV with VI or some other good text editor and I wrote a simple script that re-arranged the data so that everything was back in the correct columns (comma separated) and saved it. Then imported the CSV back into excel and all was in the columns that it should be.

It didn't really take that long, maybe 10 to 15 minutes.