How to Convert PDF Files to an Excel Spreadsheet

Someone sent you a chart, graph or table in PDF format and you wished you had the information in Excel so you can play around with the numbers more. Instead of retyping all of the data into an Excel spreadsheet, there is a way you can convert the PDF to an Excel spreadsheet easily. It takes less time and effort than to start over and recreate the document in Excel.

Instructions

1

Open up the document that you want to convert in Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader; whichever program that you have on your computer. Click on "File" and then "Save as Text." Choose a file name and destination folder where you want to save the new text file.

2

Open up Excel. Click on "File" and then "Open." In the Open dialog box, click on the drop-down arrow next to "Files of Type:" and choose "All Files." Navigate to the folder where you saved the converted file, select it and click "Open".

3

Go through the wizard to import the data from the converted text file. In the first window of the wizard, choose the "Delimited" option and click "Next." In the next window, under the "Delimiters" heading, make sure that "Tab" is the only option selected. You should see your data previewed at the bottom of the window. Click "Next" again and then "Finish." Save the document as an Excel document.