My impression is that Acrobat 7.0 no longer supports file conversion
from PDF to Excel.  Is this correct?

I have tried lots of alternative ways of doing this and all have
failed.

1. I tried using Adobe Acrobat 7.0"s "Save As", to save an open file to
Excel.  But unfortunately "Save As  XLS" is not an available option.
2. I tried copying a PDF file into an open Excel file (Select All |
Copy (then go to the Excel file) Paste).  But this procedure puts all
the data into the Excel's left-hand column, i.e., the result is
useless.
3. I tried using Adobe Acrobat 7.0's Select tool.  But it doesn't seem
to do any selecting.
4. I tried looking up "Excel" in Adobe's Help.  But Excel is not
mentioned in Adobe Acrobat 7.0's Help file

I then downloaded various conversion softwares.  ABBYY  PDF Transformer
works the best, and is inexpensive (US$49).

But surely Adobe Acrobat 7.0 should be able to convert PDF to Excel?
Why should I need to spend more money?

So I started to search Google.

There is a rather well known advice piece at McGill Library:
http://www.library.mcgill.ca/edrs/services/publications/howto/PDFtoXLS/PDFtoExcel.html


But this doesn't solve the problem, as it only deals with Acrobat 6.0.


Strangely, there is an organization called the Georgia Straight
Alliance which has the following extensive advice, but it doesn't seem
(to me) to work:

"From the Acrobat 6.0 (Professional) Help topic "Copying and pasting
tables":

You can select and copy a table by dragging it to a spreadsheet
application,
such as Microsoft Excel, copying it to the clipboard, or saving it to a
file
that can then be loaded or imported to another application. If you have
a CSV-compliant application on your system, such as Excel, you can open
the selected table directly in the application."

NO - this doesn't work!  The data in the table copies all in the
left-hand column!

"To copy a table using the Select Table tool:

1. Select the Select Table tool . The tool is accessible via the
Selection
toolbar.
2. Click in the table to select the entire table, or drag a box around
the
rows and columns to be copied.
3. Do one of the following:
l To copy the table to an open document in another authoring
application, Ctrl-click (Windows) or Command-click (Mac OS), and
choose Copy Selected Table. Then paste the table into the open
document.
l To copy the table to a file, Ctrl-click (Windows) or Control-click
(Mac OS), and choose Save Selected Table As. Name the table,
select a location and the format, and click Save."

No!  There is no Save As xls" in Acrobat 7.0

"l To copy the table to a spreadsheet, Ctrl-click (Windows) or
Control-click (Mac OS), and choose Open Table in Spreadsheet.
Your CSV-compliant application, such as Excel, opens to a new
spreadsheet displaying the imported table."

No!  There is no such choice!

"l To use a document's tag information during table selection,
Ctrl-click (Windows) or Control-click (Mac OS), and choose
Select Table Uses Document Tags. This option is on by default
in tagged PDF documents. The option is grayed out if the
document is not a tagged PDF document. You can turn the
option off (if a document is poorly tagged, for example), to
override a document's tag information during table selection.
l To copy a table in RTF, drag the selected table into an open
document in the target application."

I can't make sense of this suggestion.

Has anyone else managed to get Adobe Acrobat 7.0 to do, what it surely
should be able to do?

"coree" <matthew@montagu-pollock.org.uk> wrote:
>
>"From the Acrobat 6.0 (Professional) Help topic "Copying and pasting
>tables":

I haven't tested this, but it seems to me that you should probably be
reading the Acrobat 7 help guide instead. Try the topic "Copying
tables", which does mention Excel; searching for Excel finds it too...
(I have Acrobat 7.0.0 US English).

Remember that any data to be copied must be text, not a scanned page
for instance.
----------------------------------------
Aandi Inston  quite@dial.pipex.com http://www.quite.com
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Aandi Inston wrote:
> "coree" <matthew@montagu-pollock.org.uk> wrote:
> >
> >"From the Acrobat 6.0 (Professional) Help topic "Copying and pasting
> >tables":
>
> I haven't tested this, but it seems to me that you should probably be
> reading the Acrobat 7 help guide instead. Try the topic "Copying
> tables", which does mention Excel; searching for Excel finds it
too...
> (I have Acrobat 7.0.0 US English).
>
> Remember that any data to be copied must be text, not a scanned page
> for instance.
> ----------------------------------------
> Aandi Inston  quite@dial.pipex.com http://www.quite.com
> Please support usenet! Post replies and follow-ups, don't e-mail
them.


Yes, well, I HAVE tested it, and I can't get it to work (you are right
about searching for Excel though, not sure how I missed that).

The Acrobat 7.0 explanation is rather cryptic.  It says:

"To copy the table directly to a spreadsheet, Ctr-click (Windows)
Control-Click (Mac OS) the table, and choose Open Table in Spreadsheet.
 Your CSV-compliant application, such as Excel, opens to a new
spreadsheet displaying the imported table."

This doesn't seem to work for me.  Right clicking on the table (or
Ctr-click) produces the following options:

Add Note
Add Bookmark
Hand Tool
Zoom Tools
Next Page
Select All
Deselect All
Print
Search

No 'Open Table in Spreadsheet'.

So I am stuck.  Any suggestions?

coree wrote:


> The Acrobat 7.0 explanation is rather cryptic.  It says:
> 
> "To copy the table directly to a spreadsheet, Ctr-click (Windows)
> Control-Click (Mac OS) the table, and choose Open Table in Spreadsheet.
>  Your CSV-compliant application, such as Excel, opens to a new
> spreadsheet displaying the imported table."
> 
> This doesn't seem to work for me.  Right clicking on the table (or
> Ctr-click) produces the following options:
> 
> Add Note
> Add Bookmark
> Hand Tool
> Zoom Tools
> Next Page
> Select All
> Deselect All
> Print
> Search
> 
> No 'Open Table in Spreadsheet'.
> 
> So I am stuck.  Any suggestions?

Just an oddball suggestion: Is it possible that what you are looking at 
is not actually a table in any sense that Acrobat recognizes? I mean it 
may be a tabular layout to your eyes, but how was it created in the 
first place?

Why not run a different test. Create your own Excel spreadsheet; distill 
it; then try the same procedure.

Well, I have two replies to this: 1. The table is in pdf  2. I have in
fact already successfully converted it to Excel using the ABBYY PDF
Transfomer.  But I want to understand how to do it with Adobe Acrobat
7.0!

"coree" <matthew@montagu-pollock.org.uk> wrote:

>Well, I have two replies to this: 1. The table is in pdf 

What do you mean by this?  To start with, is it text - can you select
text and copy it, ignoring any fancy table stuff?

>2. I have in fact already successfully converted it to Excel using the ABBYY PDF
> Transfomer.  

That is interesting but doesn't prove anything. For instance, maybe
this tool uses ABBYY's OCR technology.
----------------------------------------
Aandi Inston  quite@dial.pipex.com http://www.quite.com
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