Hi everyone, Kevin here.
Today I want to show you how you can convert a PDF file to an Excel spreadsheet.
PDF is by far one of the most popular file types
and you might have some data hidden away in a PDF that you'd like to analyze in Microsoft Excel.
Unfortunately, it's not incredibly intuitive for how you could take data from a PDF
and bring it into Microsoft Excel. It turns out it's pretty easy to do,
and I'm going to show you step-by-step how you can get your data out of a PDF into an Excel file.
All right, well why don't we jump on the PC and get started here?
Here I am on my PC, and I have a PDF file sitting on my desktop and I'd like to bring
the data into Excel to analyze it. Let's take a quick look at what's in the PDF.
I have the PDF file open and it's a fairly typical PDF.
I have an image at the top. I have some text below it, and then here's the portion of the
PDF that I want to bring into Excel. It's a table with some sales data for the Kevin Cookie Company.
How do we get this into Excel?
Well, let's open up Microsoft Excel and I'll show you how. I have Microsoft Excel open,
and this is the latest and greatest version that comes with Microsoft 365.
To bring a PDF into Microsoft Excel, first off, let's click into a blank workbook.
This drops us into a blank workbook and right now it's a completely blank canvas.
To bring a PDF into Microsoft Excel, let's go onto the top tabs and click on the one that says data.
Once we click on data, this opens up the data ribbon and over on the left-hand side,
there's an option that says get data. Let's click on this. Within the get data drop down,
there are many different places where we could pull in data into Microsoft Excel.
For instance, you could pull data in from files, from databases, from Azure. Many different places,
even from the web. Today, though, we're going to focus on how to pull data in from a PDF.
A PDF is a file, so let's click on the first one that says from file.
Within the from file list, you'll see lots of different file types that you could pull data in,
and here's the one that we're interested in. It says from PDF.
Let's click on this one. This opens up the Windows file picker. Navigate to where you have your PDF
file on your computer. My file happens to be sitting right on the desktop called the Kevin
Cookie Company sales by location. I'm going to click on this file and then click on import.
This opens up the Microsoft Excel Navigator and Excel has analyzed my PDF to see if there's any
data within the PDF. Here I see the top-level PDF and within here it identified two different items.
It found the table within the PDF,
and this is exactly the table that I want to bring into Microsoft Excel.
It also identified the overall page, but I don't want to bring in things like the text
or the image or other things. This isn't what I'm looking for, so I'm going to click on table.
Now let's say that you have a PDF with many different tables of data.
Up here, you could click on select multiple items, and then you could go through and select
all the different tables that you want to bring into Microsoft Excel.
I'm going to uncheck this since I just have one table of data and
I'm going to click on table 001, that's on Page 1.
Down below in the bottom right-hand corner, I have two different options.
I could load it directly into Excel and I'm going to do that in just a moment,
and I also have the option to transform the data. Now transforming the data allows me
to make some modifications to the data before I bring it into Microsoft Excel.
For instance, let's say that I didn't want to bring in the
store number column or maybe I want to add another column
with a calculated field, I could do that before importing it into Microsoft Excel.
However, today I just want to bring the table in as is, so I'm going to click on load.
This loads my data directly into Microsoft Excel and it's exactly like it looked in my PDF.
I didn't have to copy and paste the data in.
I didn't have to retype things,
instead I simply went to get data and now all of my data shows up in Microsoft Excel.
I didn't have to get any plugins, I didn't have to use any other applications.
Instead, all I have to do is use Microsoft Excel and I can get data in from a PDF.
Now that my data is in the Excel spreadsheet, I could do
any type of analysis that I want because it's now out of the confines of a PDF document.
All right, well that was a quick look at how you can take data that's stuck in a PDF,
and you could bring it into Microsoft Excel to do additional analysis on your data.
If you found this video helpful and you now know how to get data from a PDF into Excel,
please give this video a thumbs up. If you want to see more videos like this in the future,
hit that subscribe button. That way you'll get a notification anytime new content like
this comes out, and lastly, if you want to see me cover any other topics in the future,
leave a comment down below and I'll add it to my list of videos to create. All right,
well that's all I had for you today. I hope you enjoyed, and I hope to see you next time, bye.