You’ve got a huge spreadsheet of data that was imported from PDF. How about converting PDF to Excel? You need to convert this into a format that’s easier to work with, like an Excel spreadsheet. Experts like Adobe Acrobat suggest, “After the PDF to Excel conversion, download your new Excel workbook.
Copy data from the PDF
- Go to the PDF document you want to copy data from and select the text you want to copy.
- Right-click on your selected text, then click Copy from the menu that appears. This copies your selection to your computer’s clipboard, which is temporary storage for the information you can transfer between applications (like Word or Excel).
- Open Microsoft Excel and create a new blank worksheet in the workbook where you’d like to paste this Data into a new cell.
- Open Excel’s Home tab, then click cell A1 on that sheet if it’s not already selected; this will make sure your cursor starts off in cell A1 when you paste your copied text into it in Step 5 below so that your copied data will go right into this column of empty cells!
Paste into a new sheet in Excel
To paste the Soda PDF data into a new Excel sheet, use the Paste Special feature. To access Paste Special, go to Data> Data Tools > Transformations. Then choose “Paste Special” on the menu that appears.
Use the convert text feature to separate text into columns
Next, convert the text to columns. This will separate the data into individual cells.
You can select the cells with your data and then select the whole range of cells, or you can use the fill handle at the bottom right corner of each cell to drag a box over all of them. Then go to Data> Convert Text To Columns. This will bring up a new dialog box where you can choose whether or not you want duplicate rows removed (your choice). Click OK and watch as Excel does its magic!
Include headers for your columns
Adding headers manually is easy, but it will take some time and effort, especially if you have many columns that need headers. Fortunately, there is an automated way to add them, so you don’t have to spend as much time doing this task manually:
- Click on any cell within your data range.
- Select ‘Data’ tab and click on ‘Sort & Filter’ option.
- Here you can select how you want to sort or filter your data by selecting either a custom order or choosing one of its built-in options (for example: ascending/descending).
Delete extra spaces, line breaks and blank cells
The next step is to remove all the extra spaces, line breaks, and blank cells that are not required for your spreadsheet. Here’s how:
- Delete all extra spaces by clicking on “Delete” in the Home tab.
- Delete all line breaks by selecting “Expand All” in Format > Paragraphs group.
- Delete any blank cells by selecting them individually and pressing the backspace key once or twice while holding down the Ctrl key.
Once you’ve finished copying the data from your PDF into Excel, you can do whatever you want with it. This guide must have helped you! If not, try some of the other posts on how to work with spreadsheets or analyze data in Excel.
