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Re: Extracting table data from PDF

Hello all,

I am working on digitising records from old surveys, many of which have been scanned and OCR'd into PDF format.  We had the idea of transferring the tables straight from PDF into Excel but our attempts so far have not worked.  My question to you all is has anyone else done this kind of thing and what do they use?

We have tried to copy and paste from Adobe Reader but it loses all formating. Then a colleague had a play with Adobe Writer but found similar problems.  In previous jobs I have used Monarch to extract data from tables, and the professional version will handle various formats of PDF (it's not as solid a standard as you might expect!), but it is very expensive and beyond what we can afford.

Thanks in advance for any tips!

Mike Beard
Natural Course Project Officer
Greater Manchester Local Records Centre

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Re: Extracting table data from PDF

Try the free facility provided by Nitro to convert PDF's to Excel.  It can be found here:

http://www.pdftoexcelonline.com/

Hope it helps.

Steve

Steve J. McWilliam
www.rECOrd-LRC.co.uk
www.stevemcwilliam.co.uk/guitar/

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Re: Extracting table data from PDF

Thanks Steve.

I'm negotiating with our IT department for permission to access that page .  Wish me luck!

Mike Beard
Natural Course Project Officer
Greater Manchester Local Records Centre

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Re: Extracting table data from PDF

Hi,

Quick update.  IT have refused access to your free solution and had trouble getting hold of a trial version of Nitro with OCR, so when I get a minute I'm going to have a go myself with Adobe Writer.

Mike Beard
Natural Course Project Officer
Greater Manchester Local Records Centre

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Re: Extracting table data from PDF

What a brilliant resource that is, Steve.  I could have done with it last week.  30 min rather tedious workaround done in 30 sec.  Thanks for the tip.

Murdo