How to copy/Paste a table from PDF to Excel using AcrobatX

[Guest]

How to copy/Paste a table from PDF to Excel using AcrobatX?

I was able to do this easily using acrobat 9 but cannot do it in Acrobat10.

Has the option fgone or am I missing something?

Tomas

[Dave Merchant]

Rather than copy and paste, Acrobat X exports to an Excel workbook from where you can transfer into an existing table if required.

To save a specific table from a PDF document, draw a selection box around it, right-click the selection and choose Export Selection As, then choose Excel Workbook from the file type menu. You can also run OCR on demand to convert a bitmap image of a table into a real table. All the formatting of the cells will be transferred across, where supported.

If you have a table alone in a PDF file, you can simply choose File - Save As - Spreadsheet to convert the entire thing.

[dissipatedfog]

That doesn't work for me! What used to copy and paste as a nice table is now a wreck. I have to reconcile several credit card statements in Excel at my job, it used to be so easy to copy and paste as a table. Now some of the rows paste into separate columns but most don't now. I ran the OCR and it made no difference. I've tried saving the file as an Excel spreadsheet and a Word doc, but the columns don't come up correctly. Is there a fix for this?

[dissipatedfog]

Thank you for the information, I'll give it a try - after spending over $300 on Acrobat Standard X.

[Bev_Meister]

This is a major pain in the neck. I'm working with X and 9 Pro and whilst the latter wasn't perfect, it was easy to extract info from tables.  X exports data imperfectly to Excel.  Formatting looks great but what use is that when stores individual cells with multiple data. Painful painful painful.  I have to downgrade to be productive. This should be a bug or feature fix if anyone at Adobe is listening.

[AbhigyanModi]

When you are copying, are you using "Copy with formatting" ?

[dissipatedfog]

I am using "Copy with formatting". I've tried every different way I can see and nothing works. It's unfortunate because this feature is the reason I upgraded from Reader after doing a trial with version 9. Is there any way to downgrade to Acrobat 9 standard using the same reg key?

[jstanley5003]

Yes I too found the copy and paste in Acrobat 9 functional , upgraded to X which has been a huge waste of money. I started with Acrobat 4.0 and usually each version provided better features until now hopefully someone at Adobe monitors these posts and will provide a fix in the future. Will probably have to uninstall Version X and reinstall 9

[Bev_Meister]

I have the 9 and X installed and they work fine together- got the updaters working in tandem.  Strangely this is one area where Adobe apps can co-exist unlike other vendors

[jstanley5003]

Had I known that at the time would have been worth it as it was when I went to install X it told me to unistall the old version and when I did and then tried to run X it said I couldn't upgrade because it couldn't find a current version on my computer so had dig out the old copy so that the X would install and give me credit for owning a previous version. So far haven't seen X do anything better than version 9 for the purposes I use it for. I'll try installing 9 back over the top of X , thanks for the tip.

[atir.husain]

Can you please share how you created the pdf you are using.

And if possible could you share the pdf so that i can reproduce the issue at my end.

[jstanley5003]

Appreciate the offer but the file is from an insurance company and the client information is protected so I can’t release. But when we use copy or copy format it puts it in an entirely different format in the excel spread sheet either all data in one column or in formatted in several columns but still the data is combined where as when you use copy as a table in Acrobat 9 it lays it out perfectly in excel just like in the pdf. After using Acrobat X now for a couple of weeks definitely wasn’t worth upgrading from 9.0 to X. Thanks for the offer though.

[atir.husain]

Which version of Microsoft Office are you using?

If you are using office 2010 make sure that you are not pasting the table with “Keep text only" option.

[Dave Merchant]

It's almost certain that the PDF file isn't tagged (either at all, or properly). Accessible, tagged files will export to spreadsheets as Acrobat can understand what's a table, what's a header cell, etc. whereas in an untagged file it has to make guesses based on the separation of each text block (it can't see the page visually as you do, so what looks like a perfectly-obvious table to a human is actually very difficult to detect in code).

[Bill12]

The alternative is to do column or block copies. In the past this was done by using the alt key when selecting the area of interest (works in my AA9). That allows you to copy column by column and generally the lines separations will still be used. Hope that does it.

[jstanley5003]

Thanks for the response however I've tried this and it just doesn't work right, after having worked with Acrobat X even more it just isn't as good as 9.0, documents I used to be able to OCR now have more unrecognized or miss recognized items than 9.0 and the only thing I have changed is going from 9.0 to 10.0. This appears to have been nothing but a profit move from Adobe just a few bells and whistles. This is the first time Adobe has failed to deliver a significant improvement by introducing a new version and I started with 4.0

[Bill12]

I am surprised on the OCR. Most folks have reported the OCR in AA X to be a great improvement. It may be that your original copy is just that bad and AA 9 would have done no better.

[gfh2009xx]

I have discovered a work around.  Select the table you are trying to copy, right click and select "export selection as" and save it as a .docx file.  Open the word document, copy the table again and paste it into an open excel file.  The columns will be maintained and your data will be in seperate cells instead of all of it in one cell.  It's not one easy step like it used to be, but it does work.

[Sanathan5684]

We too work with Insurance documents where we have to pick the tables from the pdf to excel.

While googling we found the below and helped us a lot.

Give it a try , i hope this works for you.

Not the best , but does the work.

http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/PDF20.html

[sophsterm]

I have the same problem. I'm running Acrobat Pro X. I'm trying to extract or copy with formatting a beautiful table from a PDF document into Excel OR Word and the table does not export or paste into Word or Excel; with the proper formatting. OCR doesn't read it for some reason. In your instructions you say:

To check the table in the PDF document:

1. Advanced > Accessibility > TouchUp Reading Order...

What Acrobat Pro version are you referencing? I'm not sure where you access "Advanced". Properties, settings, preferences,  what? I try Preferences, then Accessibility, and don't see what you're seeing. I see this. No idea where this Touchup Reading order is.

I check Touchup further down and see this. Again, nothing about reading order.

I've tried both these methods after selecting the table.

But the file format looks like this:

[CSeiler2012]

We just had some of our users get new computers.  Instead of Acrobat 9 standard, they now have Acrobat XI Standard.  While they used to use "Copy as Table" and paste directly into Word or Excel with good results, they are unable to do so. This feature seems to be completely removed.  Now we are using "Export selection as..." instead.  However, the result is that there are many more steps involved.  We want to paste into an existing document.  Before, we just did the selection, right-click, copy as table, paste into existing document.  Now, we do selection, right-click, Export selection as..., create a new file each time, open file, select from new file, paste in new document, delete unneeded file.  This is much more burdensome than procedure in version 9, and it is much more confusing to the users who now have to create and understand extra files that are being created just to handle stuff that used to be handled through copying to and pasting from the clipboard.

[ApoorvM]

Hi,

You can use Copy with formatting option to copy tables from a PDF . You can right click on a selection and then choose copy with formatting from the menu. You can also do a rectangular selection, by holding down Ctrl key and then dragging mouse to make a rectangular selection over a PDF content, and then right click on the selection to choose Copy with formatting from the options.

I hope it helps.

-Apoorv

[CSeiler2012]

Thank you, Aprorov, Copy with Formatting does not perform the same.  There was a feature in 9 called Copy as Table as well.  This is now missing and performs differently than Copy with Formatting, which brings a lot of the superficial formatting with it when you paste, but doesn't maintain the tables as version 9 did. The export works, but takes many more steps.

[ApoorvM]

Thanks for checking it out. Ideally, Copy with Formatting *should* work for most of the cases. So, does it 'not work' for some/one particular case or do you face the issue with other PDFs as well?

Can you please share a pdf file (if it isn't confidential) , it would be helpful .

-Apoorv

[CSeiler2012]

Thanks Apoorv, the specific instance we have is quite confidential.  Although I know we've had other examples that aren't, the one we're working on is. The Copy as Table feature worked well in these cases.