Unlike Word 2013 and later, Excel does not have a built-in converter to open a PDF file. You will therefore be using one of the many third-party packages that profess to convert PDF files to Excel. I have not been impressed with the accuracy of the third-party conversion software I have used. T struggle with wrapped text and merged cells. If the original is scanned, you should expect to spend a lot of time doing careful proof-reading. A spellchecker can fix a lot of OCR errors on a text document, but you can’t do that with numeric data. My experience has been that scanned originals going through OCR conversion have errors in both the digits and decimal point location. I print the converted document the same size as the original and fold the printout so I can compare it to the original line by line. It’s a lot of work, but it is faster than typing in all the data and then proof-reading. How much work? On the order of an hour per page in my experience. If the PDF is a digital file rather than a scanned original, you can open it in Word. Or you can copy the text from Word To Pdf Conversion and paste it in Word. Tabular data will end up in a Word Table with excellent accuracy. You may then copy from Word into Excel, and the process will go smoothly. This “Word-washing” approach to PDF conversion is much better than a direct copy from PDF and paste into Excel. You’ll spend a lot less time editing the results in Excel if you take the indirect path through Word first.
However, some customers complain that the Word table cannot be saved as a .csv file for use in spreadsheets. Some do not want a text document, but want PDF images in their spreadsheets. The good news is that Word Table can also be converted to use a spreadsheet. One of the major differences between Excel 2013 and Excel 2007 is the Word Table. The Table contains a column for each column of text in the original document. There is also a column on the second line of the Table (one column higher) that lets you see the approximate number of rows and columns in the original document. This approach is more accurate than a direct scan of the original, using the Scan button on the ribbon. You may need to adjust this number to avoid double-spacing. It is usually not essential to adjust the number given by you for the table,.