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Question

For Export PDF to Spreadsheet , how to export Table which is a Picture?

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
April 12, 2023
6 replies
6715 views

For PDF which is created by Adobe PageMaker, there is a Table which is a Picture.

Adobe PDF Export to Spreadsheet fails; I am still getting a Picture from its Excel conversion.

Is there any settings to Export Picture of a Excel Table to Spreadsheet?

This topic has been closed for replies.

Abambo

Community Expert

Everyone here should consider that OCR on picture-tables is not trivial. The Adobe OCR is quite good, but it's not perfect, and its primary use is to get searchable text, where you do not need a perfect result in most of the cases. I really would tend to say that you need to access a high end OCR program for this.

ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer

S

Sunny26326757tb7eAuthor

Known Participant

Thanks, Is there OCR to get formatting of Table... for me, it is useful for

find Setting related to print legibility
uploading my Table publicly for troubleshooting

App to OCR Table Formatting will save muh time hand tracing Picture to replicate Table.

Abambo

Community Expert

Optical Character Recognition tries to stay faithful to the original, but especially with tables, you may experience errors, where numbers get recognized wrongly. If you recognize characters instead of numbers (like O instead of 0), you have a chance to see that, but if numbers get swapped or omitted, you will have a hard time checking the data, cell by cell.

ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer

M

MikeKaiser

New Participant

Sounds like we're having a similiar problem. I have a table in a PDF that's an image and need to get it out to a Excel format for editing. I currently use another PDF editing software that was making hash of it, so I thought I try Acrobat but unfortunately Acrobat didn't fare any better. If I try to export directly to Excel, I just get an image of the table. If I OCR the table first, the output is gibberish.

Reading through the messages here I saw that Brad suggested using more dedicated OCR software and looking about a bit I settled on [I don't know how Adobe feels about using the names of competitors but the name of the software is very close to the name of the place that monks live]. Free trial, no CC.

I just tried one table but so far it looks really good.

Luke Jennings3

Community Expert

You can mention the name of other software on this forum if you like.

As for getting the type in an editible table to match an image of a table, first determine the fonts used to make the chart, this can be done by uploading a small sample of the type image to a site like "what the font"

https://www.myfonts.com/pages/whatthefont?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIuOnno_ir_gIVw-jjBx0tMQLcEAAYASAAEgIfffD_BwE

If you can use the actual font, or a close substitute, this may fix some of the spacing and re-flow issues on the OCR'd chart. Another option might be to place the chart image into an InDesign page, set the opacity to 50% on a bottom locked layer (as a visual reference), create a new InDesign table on a top layer, and paste the text into it, finally exporting as an XML.

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Sunny26326757tb7eAuthor

Known Participant

Thanks Luke, I have been stacking (PowerPoint which is allowed in my environment) different Font combinations in Front of said Picture of Table; only best-matching and laborious but result is much better than online Apps I tried (inlcuding yours). Also, I have yet found an App that recognize Font Size.

APPENDIX

Screenshot of Font Type and Size I am guessing:

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Sunny26326757tb7eAuthor

Known Participant

I am resorting to hand trace Table.All Cell dimensions are now done by manually changing Column Width and Row Height with Picture inserted into Sheet; the next challenge is to overtype same content but Picture cannot be behind Sheet. I tried Picture in Header but it is distorted because of Paper Size cannot be set to 22" of my Laptop.

I would think anyone who wish to share their Spreadsheet publicly but have to scrub confidential information need some tool to replicate SpreadSheet formatting; is there such tool?

Brad @ Roaring Mouse

Community Expert

Sorry, what you want is beyond the tools available. If your table is truly a picture (raster-based), it would need to be OCR'd to make it back into text, and that will only be as good as the quality of the image, and even so, most OCR programs are not font identifiers. Acrobat (and also a couple of different standalone OCR apps I have used) can only be relied on to do so much. At best, you could hope it might identify the difference between a regular and bold font, and maybe if it's a serif or a san-serif, but that is truly a long-shot.

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Sunny26326757tb7eAuthor

Known Participant

To explain more about my case on sharing publicly an issue without its confidential data, please find following screenshot showing

Whole Table shown in Print Screen of Display
Example of distorted Picture (when in Background) is in Magnify Glass (Yellow Textbox)
Sheet Paper Size A3 Landscale
Table Grid Color - Picture is Black (Shaded) ; Sheet (to be populated) is in Red
Table Title Text Font Color - Picture is White; Sheet is Font Color Black
Table Body Text Font Color - Picture is Black Shaded; Sheett is Font Color Black

It is a challenge to create Table to align with Picture in Background.

As mentioned, Picture inserted into Sheet has no distortion problem but block me from keyboarding content.

JR Boulay

Community Expert

Go to : Acrobat Pro : File menu : Export to : Spreadsheet

And try this:

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe

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Sunny26326757tb7eAuthor

Known Participant

Thanks before I proceed to acquire Acrobat Pro, does it also export formatting as well ?

JR Boulay

Community Expert

I don't know.

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe

Brad @ Roaring Mouse

Community Expert

If you are able to share the file, we might be able to suggest a workflow for you

Brad @ Roaring Mouse

Community Expert

Probably not.

If the original Table was indeed a picture, or text converted to outline at some point in the past, then there is no text to export.

You could attempt to OCR the table in Acrobat, and then export the recognized text, but it may not be cohesive enough for Acrobat to "recognize" it as a table to export it as anything resembling a spreadsheet. OCR is rarely a 100% solution.

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Sunny26326757tb7eAuthor

Known Participant

Thanks, after some more thought, what I really need is replicate of Table formatting. I have yet found a App to export Picture Table including Formatting.

There are multiple reasons:

upload to public which I need to scrub the content
try different Fonts to get best print legibility

Since this very large Table is Financial Report, it cannot be public.

Brad @ Roaring Mouse

Community Expert

Normally this is not a workflow I would suggest, but you could try open the PDF in Illustrator.

At least there you can see if the copy in your table is actually useable live text or something else. Even if so, you're not going to get automatic reformatting into a spreadsheet without manual intervention.

And if by formatting, you mean everything from actual font/sizes, etc., that's not possible.

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