Adobe Acrobat Export To Excel Not Working

[Billie Kjergaard]

Iam experiencing an issue when I PDF an excel file that my images, within the table, are not showing up. My links are also not working anymore. All of this started with the last adobe and excel updates which hit at the same time for me.

@Jeremiah_ click on "File", "Save As", pick a location, put a new name, select "Save as Type" and change it to "PDF", then click on "options" and mark the checkbox "Ignore print areas", click "Ok" and "Save".

When I copy text out of a PDF file and into a text editor, it ends up mangled in a variety of ways. Formatting like bold and italics are lost; soft line breaks within a paragraph of text are converted to hard line breaks; dashes to break a word over two lines are preserved even when they shouldn't be; and single and double quotes are replaced with ? signs.

Firstly, you have to understand what a PDF is. PDFs are designed to mimic a printed page, and they are designed only as an output format, not an input format. a PDF is basically a map containing the exact location of characters (individual letters or punctuation, etc.) or images. In most cases, a PDF does not even store information about where one word ends and another begins, much less things like soft breaks vs. hard breaks for paragraph endings.

Anyway, it's up to your software to implement some kind of "artificial intelligence" to extract merely from the locations of individual characters what is a word, what is a paragraph, and so on. Different software is going to do this better than others, and it's also going to depend on how the PDF was made. In any case, you should never expect perfect results. Having the output PDF is not the same as having the source document. Far better to try to obtain that if you can.

There is free software that can be used to extract text from PDFs with some of formatting intact, but again, don't expect perfect results. See, e.g., calibre (which can convert to RTF format), pdftohtml/pdfreflow or the AbiWord word processor (with all import/export plugins enabled). There's also a PDF import plugin for OpenOffice.

Another option is to download and start using the free pdf viewer, Foxit (its good).Then you can 'Save As' and choose .txt to convert it to a text file.That will preserve all the formatting. Dunno whether you can do the same in Adobe because I stopped using it a while ago when I converted to Foxit.

There is a very good online tool called Sej-da. Its deals with Advanced PDF Manipulation. There is no software to download. As it is a new online tool it is currently still in Beta. It allows you to extract text from a PDF, as well as providing a myriad of other PDF functionalities

For tables: With Acrobat 9/10 there was a select tables feature. With Acrobat X you can just click Save As > Spreadsheet > Excel. It even concatenates pages into one long spreadsheets. Awesome feature.

Foxit will toggle between displaying the original file as normal PDF or as text by pressing Ctrl + 6 (With a little fiddling with the zoom level of the text mode there's not much jump in position back and forth between reading and copying)

You could copy from adobe reader into MS Excel and format (table) the way you want and then copy and paste from Excel. This solution works great. You don't need to buy expensive adobe professional copy.

I was trying to save the the text and format of a pdf that was organized in a table. In Acrobat Professional, I realized there is a 'Save As' option that allows saving as an excel document. This worked well for my needs. I also noticed there is a Save As Word document option as well. I didn't try it though.

Here is a useful trick to quickly resolve this without having to remove all the line breaks manually. Basically, all it does is automatically replace all the unwanted line breaks with a single space, making all the text run together into a single paragraph:

3a8082e126