As Excel has continued to evolve, the improvements made in getting information into Excel has been phenomenal. The area where it is still lacking is with regards a ‘convert pdf to Excel’ tool.

Pdf’s have become a popular way of sending numerical information like trial balances, bank statements, debtor and creditor statements. However, they have caused major problems with the recipients of the information as they typically want to put the information into a spreadsheet and work with it (reconciling a bank statement to the cash book for example).

At the moment, even if the pdf was originally created in Excel (FILE, SAVE AS, PDF), when you try and bring it back into Excel, all items are dumped into the first column. You now have to work through the Convert Text to Column (follow link for video clip) tool to get it into a usable format. In some cases it is so much work that it would be better just to manually type in the information.

Unfortunately there is no current in-built solution. As such we recommend that you use one of the Pdf to Excel converters that are available. You can see one of the ones we recommend on the Pdf to Excel download page