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!