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Anonymous
April 25, 2015
Answered

I need to convert PDF to Excel, however, columns and tabs make many merged cells and many blank columns. In addition to not separate the columns correctly, I see many not separate lines together in the same cell. I'm even thinking that Adobe Acrobat

  • April 25, 2015
  • 3 replies
  • 82215 views

I need to convert PDF to Excel, however, columns and tabs make many merged cells and many blank columns. In addition to not separate the columns correctly, I see many not separate lines together in the same cell. I'm even thinking that Adobe Acrobat Pro DC has limitations. There is no way to define what points in columns to force break column? Nor create many columns that are useless? How does text to column in Excel, fixed size when we import text, and define where the breaks have columns?

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    Correct answer CtDave

    PDF does not contain columns, rows, formats, styles, or other aspects of word processing or spreadsheet file formats.

    This is because PDF is decidedly not a word processing or spreadsheet file format or something "like" one of those.

    (see ISO 32000 for what PDF "is")

    What can optimize the export of PDF page content is to start with a well-formed tagged PDF (ISO 14289-1, PDF/UA-1 compliant).

    Without that export is what it is and one performs whatever content cleanup is needed using the native application for the export file (MS Word or Excel).

    Be well...

    3 replies

    S
    SBrad249
    Inspiring
    April 30, 2025

    Good day!

    I had a similar thing... I have a stock-taking form which is created on InDesign (could have been Excel, but I am an Adobe Fan!) This is then exported to a PDF.  The PDF then has fields (some free text, some drop-down, and some calculated) throughout.

    Below is an idea of the form in Adobe 'creation mode'

    Exporting this gave a lot of merged cells - as below:

    Now, firstly... I am in no way a computer 'whizz'... but to me, it appears as though when trying to export the page to Excel, Adobe 'looks' for a grid-like structure to create the same thing as an output... and if the edges of your 'Adobe form fields' 'overlay' or bleed over the anticipated grid, then Adobe doesn't 'see' the grid itself and the outpout becomes merged...

    To solve this I opened the Adobe file and 'created a new form' from the existing file... I then made the fields that seemed to be causing the issue slightly smaller, such that the 'grid' had the smallest area of visible white-space around it, and then saved the file as an updated version - the result was as below:

    This worked for my type of document... I hope this helps 🙂

    maxwellg15534381
    maxwellg15534381
    Participant
    March 24, 2016

    This is a major shortcoming of Adobe's PDF to Excel functionality. It does this even with well-formed, clean PDFs.

    Here is one solution:

    1. export to Word
    2. then copy the table manually from Word into a Google Drive Spreadsheet
    3. then copy the table from Google Drive into an Excel Spreadsheet

    It works, but it's a round about way of doing what should be a simple feature for Adobe to include. Hope they add it in there soon.

      M
      Michael286031965gpw
      Participant
      April 16, 2023

      Thanks for the suggestion.  It solved my problems nicely.

      Hey Adobe, if we can do this manually, at a minimum, why don't you automate this for us.  Please be attentive to your well paying customers.

        CtDave
        CtDaveCorrect answer
        Participating Frequently
        April 25, 2015

        PDF does not contain columns, rows, formats, styles, or other aspects of word processing or spreadsheet file formats.

        This is because PDF is decidedly not a word processing or spreadsheet file format or something "like" one of those.

        (see ISO 32000 for what PDF "is")

        What can optimize the export of PDF page content is to start with a well-formed tagged PDF (ISO 14289-1, PDF/UA-1 compliant).

        Without that export is what it is and one performs whatever content cleanup is needed using the native application for the export file (MS Word or Excel).

        Be well...

        A
        Anthony23439409mdyq
        Participant
        March 4, 2022

        That makes no sense. We're want to take data in PDF and export them to an Excel file that  uses columns. The export function has to make some decisions about where the columns are located. Telling us that "it is what it is" is not helpful. A better engine is needed to correctly parse the PDF data into the correct colums. I have a PDF file with mulitple pages with excactly the same layout and some of them parse correctly to Excel columns and others do not. I'm writing this 7 years after the initial post, so this is still a problem.

          try67
          Community Expert
          try67Community Expert
          Community Expert
          March 4, 2022

          It's certainly possible to write your own algorithm to export the data in the desired format (using a script, plugin or stand-alone application), but it's not possible to change the way Acrobat does it.

          If you try to do it yourself you'll see the complexity of such an endeavor and understand why it's not so simple to create such an algorithm that works with multiple layouts.

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