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.
