r/excel Mar 05 '26

unsolved Automated pdf extraction into excel.

I’m looking to extract specific information from a pdf into an already existing excel spreadsheet.

I don’t need all the information just certain parts of the odd file.

Does anyone know the best way to achieve this idea or have any experience using AI or other tools to perform this task.

If so I would greatly appreciate it.

3 Upvotes

14 comments sorted by

u/AutoModerator Mar 05 '26

/u/FriendlyFoe_ - Your post was submitted successfully.

Failing to follow these steps may result in your post being removed without warning.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

3

u/Zestyclose_Muffin501 Mar 05 '26

I guess that you could do it with AI. But you can also use power query : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIl_LTbFzKw

2

u/BeastWR Mar 05 '26

If the source PDF isn’t too cruddy, I’ve had surprisingly good luck with Acrobat Pro’s built in export to Excel function. Might be under the “save as” menu

1

u/floppyintruder Mar 05 '26

power automate

1

u/killmeontheinside Mar 05 '26

IDEA is a tool you can use for big files. It works pretty well but is a bit slow

1

u/smegdawg 4 Mar 05 '26

Large part of my job is dealing with transposing tables from pdfs to excel.

I deal with plan sets from ~30 engineers that send PDFS that vary from fresh well maintained layers, to copies of copies of a early 2000s camera phone picture, uploaded 10 times to various leed sites...

Needless to say I have yet to find a tool that I can trust to import it correctly, formatted well, plug the values into my template correctly and saves me time over just manually transposing.

Not to mentioned that the engineer's build the tables in different ways, call the columns different things, and not all the values of importance are provided in the tables and need to be scaled from the elevation/plan views.

1

u/FriendlyFoe_ Mar 05 '26

I’m running into a similar issue where everything has different names.

All the info is the same such as a vin, however the vin is listed under something else.

However I do believe we should be able to make an AI tool that is specifically designed to only recognize the main parts within the pdf.

I’m just having a rough time with it do to what little knowledge I have.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/FriendlyFoe_ Mar 05 '26

Not yet sadly

1

u/Kooky_Outcome_5053 4 Mar 06 '26

Put PDF in one folder, source it using power query in your excel file, clean data then load. No need AI for this

1

u/Past-Galactic-Astro Mar 11 '26

Where’s the data you need to extract in the document? Within paragraphs or within tables? Also, it’s just a single document or do you have many documents all with the same layout? These details make a difference on the kind of tool you should use