How to copy table data from PDF to excel

When I copy data in a table like this from a PDF, it gets translated into plain text without any delimiting characters to distinguish which column the data is in.

It would be helpful if I could highlight only a single column in the pdf at a time, but it currently tries to select left to right both columns as I highlight. Is there any trick for this?

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6 Answers

Holding down the Alt key should allow you to select a column of text.

(Note: I've only tested this with Acrobat Pro, not Acrobat Reader.)

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You can use the Microsoft word "Convert to table" function outlined here.

It's not exactly what you need but at least it is quicker.

Try to upload it to Google Docs and then save as XLS file, it should work

If automatic conversion with the tools suggested above fail, there's always selecting one individual column at a time while pressing ALT, then pasting in Excel each column individually. It's crude, but quite reliable.

As of 2021/Office 365, you should be able to simply open the pdf in Word, then copy the resulting Word table into Excel.

It's not straight forward, however there are a large number of free or cheap services in the cloud for extracting such tables from PDFs.

Please find below the comparison table automated table extraction solutions according to Zanran:

So based on above, you may consider Zanran's Table Xtractor which has ability to finds the tables in your PDFs and converts them to Excel.

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