Trouble converting PDF to excel

Hi there,

Hope you're doing well, and thanks for reaching out!

The issue you're facing is quite common with PDFs created using tools like GPL Ghostscript 9.18. These PDFs often contain text as images or use a format that Acrobat can’t easily read, which is why copying, pasting, or converting the text doesn’t work properly.

Here are a few things you can try to fix this:

1. Use OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

• Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro

• Go to Scan & OCR > Recognize Text > In This File

• Once it finishes, try converting the file to Word or Excel again

This will help Acrobat recognize the text and should improve the conversion results.

2. Check if the PDF has real text

• Try selecting some text in the PDF

• If it selects strangely or not at all, it likely doesn’t contain real text (just images or poorly formatted text)

• In that case, using OCR (as above) is the best option

3. Optimize the PDF

• Open the PDF in Acrobat

• Go to File > Save as Other > Optimized PDF

• Under optimization options, check things like Clean Up and Discard Invalid Bookmarks

This can fix structural issues in the file and help improve conversion.

4. Print to PDF (with OCR afterward)

• Printing to PDF is a good workaround

• But after printing, open the new file and run OCR on it before converting to Excel or Word

• This can fix the issue where all content ends up in a single Excel cell

Let us know if this helps.

~Amal