I thought you might like to check out a new free PDF-to-Excel conversion service we sent live last week -- as far as we can tell it the first free tool out there. You can check it out here:
http://www.pdftoexcelonline.com
http://blog.nitropdf.com/index.php/2009/04/27/pdf-to-excel-online/
The basic idea for the service is: upload your PDF containing tables and worksheets, and receive back an XLS file containing just the tabular content, which can then be repurposed in Excel, OpenOffice, Google Docs, etc.
Apart from the free side of things, the most interesting parts of our service are:
* Ours processes files completely automatically. Most tools make you manually tell it where each table is, or automatically converts the entire file into Excel, leaving you with a lot of junk to sort through to find the tables. Just our tool and Adobe Acrobat ($300) do automatic table detection, which involves finding the tables, ignoring other content and putting all the tables into the one Excel/XLS spreadsheet.
* Recreating the appearance. Where we raise the bar on Acrobat is the fact that we do a good job at recreating the formatting of the tables. So, for example, if the cells have a background color, a san serif font is used, or rows are extra high, we do our best to keep the output XLS file looking the same. We're pretty sure we're the only ones doing that.
I'd love to hear what you think about it. Hopefully it's fast enough for you. It just got featured on MakeUseOf.com so it may not be converting at its fastest right now.
Regards,
Richard
http://www.pdftoexcelonline.com
http://blog.nitropdf.com/index.php/2009/04/27/pdf-to-excel-online/
The basic idea for the service is: upload your PDF containing tables and worksheets, and receive back an XLS file containing just the tabular content, which can then be repurposed in Excel, OpenOffice, Google Docs, etc.
Apart from the free side of things, the most interesting parts of our service are:
* Ours processes files completely automatically. Most tools make you manually tell it where each table is, or automatically converts the entire file into Excel, leaving you with a lot of junk to sort through to find the tables. Just our tool and Adobe Acrobat ($300) do automatic table detection, which involves finding the tables, ignoring other content and putting all the tables into the one Excel/XLS spreadsheet.
* Recreating the appearance. Where we raise the bar on Acrobat is the fact that we do a good job at recreating the formatting of the tables. So, for example, if the cells have a background color, a san serif font is used, or rows are extra high, we do our best to keep the output XLS file looking the same. We're pretty sure we're the only ones doing that.
I'd love to hear what you think about it. Hopefully it's fast enough for you. It just got featured on MakeUseOf.com so it may not be converting at its fastest right now.
Regards,
Richard
