Exporting to Excel

Question

Hello! I just got Acrobat so that I could conver my old bank statements in PDF to excel for my taxes. But when I export the whole doc, the columns don't transfer and I end up with a bunch of data in one cell.

So I tried to select just a column in the PDF and cut and past it, but that does not work. I have to highlight the actual text in the individual bounded boxes in the PDF for cut and paste to work. Screen shot below.

Is there a way to convince Adobe to export the data into individual cells for (at the very least) each bounded box (and hopefully also) each line and column (if they're in the same box)?

I'm actually shocked that this is so difficult! Thanks.

try67 · Answer

> Is there a way to convince Adobe to export the data into individual cells for (at the very least) each bounded box (and hopefully also) each line and column (if they're in the same box)?

- No. PDF files were not meant to be exported to other formats, and doing so is always going to be tricky, especially when you want the output to have a very structured format, like an Excel file. The results will depend greatly on how the PDF file was created, and how Acrobat interprets it. The "text boxes" you see don't really exist in the PDF file at all. They are the result of a complex algorithm that is trying to collect bits of text together into meaningful "chunks".

It might be possible to get better results using a script, but it's impossible to say for sure without seeing the actual file. It would also not be a trivial scripting task, and would require a professional developer to do it.

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