PDFs to Excel

[jaybee3]

I have numerous Access generated reports saved as PDFs. Is there any way to parse this to excel? The pdf's themselves are standard flat files, with a few fancy headers.

Any suggestions?

 

[Joe4]

This question gets asked quite a bit. If you search the forum, you will see lots of posts about it. Here is one thread that has a bunch of links to programs you can use to do this: http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/showthread.php?t=76732

 

[jaybee3]

Yeah sorry, I did a search afterwards and found a fair few threads linking to external solutions. However due to the sensitive nature of the data I'm handling these aren't viable.

 

[Joe4]

However due to the sensitive nature of the data I'm handling these aren't viable.

I am not sure what that has to do with anything. Its not like you are sending your data to those companies, you are just using downloading their software to your computer and using it.<!-- / message -->

 

[jaybee3]

Ah there are some solutions that ask you to send them the reports to extract what you need from them.

As for downloading anything to the PCs at work. You get a big slap on the wrist for that.

 

[Joe4]

Note that there are a few options that use the Abode products, which you may or may not already have. If not, maybe you can get your company to purchase them.

I have numerous Access generated reports saved as PDFs.

Note that Access reports can be exported directly to Excel too. If you do it that way (at least going forward), there will be no need for a PDF converter.

 

[jaybee3]

Yeah, I'll have an ask around. See if forking out for the software is a viable option, rather than having a fair few man hours to go through the pdfs.

Heh, with regard to the export as Excel, t'was suggested but "It doesn't look as nice." and they don't want to send excel files to the clients. Even the suggestion of saving them as excel and then converting to a pdf later or saving two files was scrapped. Such is life.

I've knocked up a query that should do the trick though, provided the previous data hasn't been modified with revised versions. So all's good.

 

[Joe4]

I deal in the same kind of environment, and in those instances we would have two distinctly different options:
- nice pretty PDF to send to clients that they cannot edit
- export from a query of the same data if data need to be used for anything else

If the client wants a pretty report that they can edit, sort, etc, we export the query to Excel, and then have an automated Excel macro to format it so that it looks nice.

Hope that helps, maybe gives you some ideas to think about.

 

[jaybee3]

Cheers for that. I'll see if they can add the saveas excel into the database, would save the trouble for this one off scenario in the future. Thanks for the suggestions