Whenever I copy /paste from a PDF file it turns up all helter skelter in
excel. It soesn't retain the row/column structure of the PDF when pasted in
excel. Perhaps I need to buy a special program. I am using excel 2003, is the
excel 2007 any better?

First, I sincerely doubt that 2007 will act any differently.

Remember that a .pdf file is pretty much a .tif graphic in a special
wrapper. So what you're copying isn't really formatted text, it's a textual
representation of a portion of a graphic that in itself represents some text.

There are darned few tools available that can take a .pdf file and turn it
back into a representation of its original source, be it Word or Excel. The
best one I've found is OmniPage Pro. And it is by no means perfect, but
amazingly better than most I've tried - unfortunately it ain't cheap.

"checkQ" wrote:

Whenever I copy /paste from a PDF file it turns up all helter skelter in
excel. It soesn't retain the row/column structure of the PDF when pasted in
excel. Perhaps I need to buy a special program. I am using excel 2003, is the
excel 2007 any better?

I see. The package costs $499.99!

Like I said - it ain't cheap. Does lots more than just convert .pdf back to
original type document, but you've got to either really, really want it or
really, really need it. I think I got my version for around $160 on sale, so
keep your eye out, they may go on sale again in the future. I have a need to
use it fairly often as I receive .pdf files that I have to work with in
various ways, and I just got tired of hand typing the darned things, so I'm
"loaded up" with both OmniPage and Adobe Acrobat Pro to deal with them.
And like I said, it's also not absolutely perfect, usually there's some
manual tweaking of the created .doc/.xls or whatever file still to be done.
So in the end, perhaps doing some cut and pasting by hand isn't so bad after
all?

"checkQ" wrote:

I see. The package costs $499.99!

Try this one instead

http://www.nuance.com/pdfconverter/

checkQ wrote:

I see. The package costs $499.99!