14th February 2008

I can save a PDF back to Word but not Excel…WHY?

posted in Tips and Tricks, Acrobat Professional, General, Acrobat for Mac, Acrobat Pro, Acrobat 3D |

Well this is a question for the ages now isn’t it.  Why? Is Word more important than Excel?  Only Microsoft can tell us that! :-) I do get asked many times, “Tim, why can I export a PDFback to Word and not Excel, or PowerPoint?”  Well Click continue to find out.

Ok, let’s look at this a little, why ever export back to any format?  Well, there are a few answers here, mostly for lost of original documents, but also for simple data reuse.  So why only Word?  (”Don’t get pushy here!”) Well because Word is a universal format within the Microsoft world.  I can copy from Word into all other Office products, with decent fidelity.  But, you say that spreadsheets are different!  They have tables, rows, columns, lions, tigers, and bears, Oh My! But never fear my young PDFling, there is a way to get your table data out of PDF directly to Excel!

Here are the steps:

1. Take a PDF that has table data

Step 1

2. Now select the Select Tool from the Toolbar

Step 2

3. Go to the upper right corner of your data in the PDF, hold your Left Mouse Button down and drag across till you get all the data you want. Right Mouse Click on some of the selected data and a context sensitive dialog box will appear. Select “Open Table in Spreadsheet”

Note: you can also copy as table and save as table as other options!

Step 3

4. Excel (or your spreadsheet editor of choice) should pop up with your table data nicely populated into cells!

Step 4

Ah, that was a nice one to get back started with! I hope that helps you in your PDF workflows!

Keep some life in your life!

Tim

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Tips and Tricks, Acrobat Professional, General, Acrobat for Mac, Acrobat Pro, Acrobat 3D. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 2 responses to “I can save a PDF back to Word but not Excel…WHY?”

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  1. 1 On April 27th, 2008, Shimmy said:

    When I try to do this with a table spit across multiple pages Adobe only sends the very last page. Anyway to save out all pages of a PDF file to excel?

  2. 2 On April 29th, 2008, Sue Foster said:

    I am having a problem with linking to email addresses once our documents have been converted from Publisher to a PDF format. The linking tool works well, but not with the email format. I can’t figure out what I am doing wrong. The tool works occasionally, but for the most part, it doesn’t.

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