PDF to Excel | PDF Services API | PDF Embed

Report · Feb 05, 2023

I have PDF's coming in and they're all exactly the same format. "First Name" and then their name is printed directly under it- same for all data in 1-4 columns per row. I successfully used Adobe Extract API to extract a JSON file with the data but I don't know how to select the data and move it to the right column in an existing excel file.

Adobe's "see how easy it is" marketing strategy has proven not so easy. So, what I would like is someone to point me in the right direction for this workflow:

1) User uploads 1 or more PDF files from their web portal into MyPHP Admin SQL database.

2) Files names are changed to coresponding client's ID number + doc type + date (ex. 1234567-receipt-20230205).

3) Adobe API is automatically triggered to parse and passes the data into a row in an existing google sheets doc and uploaded to SQL database.

(next task)

4) Data is inserted into new PDF template and saved in users profile so they can print it out.

I'm running a linux server so I'm not sure if all that is possible but even if I had a local machine processing one PDF at a time from a shared google drive folder and saving the data to google sheets, that would work too. Any recomondations for the easiest route would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Report · Feb 08, 2023

Hi, so I want to be clear, I do think our APIs are easy, but some of the things you mentioned in your list are completely out of our domain.

"1) User uploads 1 or more PDF files from their web portal into MyPHP Admin SQL database."

We can't help you with PHP. However, I can say storing binary files in databases is _typically_ a bad idea. I'd store them in the filesytem.

"2) Files names are changed to coresponding client's ID number + doc type + date (ex. 1234567-receipt-20230205)."

Again, that's on you. If you are storing the binary data in the database, then I'm not sure what filename even means here, unless you save it in a different column. You would need to use PHP to do that - again - outside of something our SDK can help with.

" Adobe API is automatically triggered to parse and passes the data into a row in an existing google sheets doc and uploaded to SQL database."

We can't auto trigger anything, but your code obviously can. The Extract API, as you have seen, can get the data out. Are you questioning why it can't edit a Google Sheet? That isn't what our API does. Once the data is out, you would need to look into Google's APIs to see about updating a sheet. I know it's possible as I've done it before, but again, that's not something the SDK is going to do for you.

"Data is inserted into new PDF template and saved in users profile so they can print it out."

We don't have an "edit" PDF feature (if you don't count OCRing, and optimizing as editing). You could generate a Word doc, update that, and then use our API to convert it to PDF, but we don't have a "edit" PDF feature in the SDK.