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Importing Data from PDF Files

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Importing Data From Pdf Files

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Happy Business Spreadsheets has developed a free Excel program to extract and import PDF data into Excel which can be downloaded and used without restriction.

There is a common need to extract and import specific data from PDF files into Excel. Since Excel does not natively support the reading of PDF content, utilities are needed to convert the PDF file content for the Excel format. Several commercial applications accomplish this; however it is often the case where only specific data is required to be imported from multiple PDF files into one structured format.

We created such an application by using VBA code in conjunction with an open source PDF to Text conversion utility, which can be found at Foolabs.

[Download the free PDF data import Excel program here]

The program relies on the conversion utility (included in the download) and all PDF files to reside in the same directory as the Excel application. Text or data to extract are defined in the Control sheet by specifying start text, end text and multiple replacements routines with wildcard support. This enables flexibility to obtain comparable data from multiple PDF files based on patterns independent of different PDF file structures.

As many extraction rules as required can be set in order to create a table of information imported by extraction rule and PDF file name. Information on how to set up rules is available within the Excel application with a help icon and cell comments. The VBA code is commented and open for modification.

Any improvements or new features to the code are welcome to be posted here so that we can update the download version to the benefit of everyone.
 Excel Business Forums Administrator
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Confused
Re:Need Help with this tool...
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Hi ,Thanks for your reply, but i couldnt still understand it completely. Do you have a mail id. I can send a sample file so that you can get a better idea. Moreover the requirement of extracting specific data from a pdf file is huge for us. If you have any tool, we can buy it too. To get started with. Here are few things. I have the insurer name at the beginning of the pdf file.   but if i set the start text as name, i get everything that has the text "name" befor it. For e.g :name of bank, etc. I am not able to understand how to set the new line things and replacement pairs data.Kindly suggest. Thanks for your time.  
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Fedup
Email sample
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You can attach a sample PDF by replying to the notification email with details of desired extraction of this post and we can look into it.
 Excel Business Forums Administrator
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Confused
Auto-formatting dates and running spaces and preceding data issues
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Hi, this is an excellent tool. Thank you for developing it. I am having a problem with the auto-formatting features for dates in excel. My data in excel looks like this: (Name of 1st School) (full URL of school website) Address: (School Address) County: (County) Phone: (Phone #) Grade Range: (Grade Range) Enrollment: (Enrollment #) District: (District) Fax:(Fax) Personnel: (Person's name Person's position) (There also may be additional people listed below or just one person listed) (Name of 2nd School) ...etc When I extract the "Grade Range", Excel is formatting what should be "1-8" or "9-12" as January 8th or September 12th. When I try to reformat after conversion back to text, the number is like 45193. Do you have a solution to keep it as "1-8", "7-12", "9-12", etc? Also, I obviously have problems with there being spaces between everything, including extra spaces within the "Personnel" line. And there is nothing unique preceding the "Name of n-th School" field. They aren't even numbered. It basically just says "Happy Mountain Example School". I would really like to extract that "Name of n-th School" field, if possible. It also creates problems with the "Personnel" field. Because if I want to get all of the "Personnel" (because there may be more than one), I have to put the end text as "Address:" because it is the only next unique text. I could use "full URL of school website", but not every school has one and nothing precedes that field. Will it help that the "Name of the n-th School" field is always in bold? A solution to either of these issues would be much appreciated. Again, thank you for this great utility.
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Oops
Formatting issues and spaces
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There are several issues to address here so let's cover them individually.
  1. The date formatting from number ranges.  One way is to retain some common preceding text such as "Range:". If this is not possible then we can add some replacement pairs from 1 to 9 with adding an apostrophe to stop Excel converting the text to a date.
  2. Extra spaces. We can remove multiple spaces by using replacement pairs specifying a double space to be found and a single space to be the replacement.
  3. The name of the school.  Sometimes we can get the initial text in a row by specifying a common text which occurs at the end of the row above. Sometimes this can be further above with wildcard replacement pairs to remove everything in between.  Text formatting is irrelevant as the conversion creates plain text before being interrogated.
  4. Personnel. It is usually best to first extract as much text as needed and then clean using rules defined in the replacement pairs.  Sometimes we need to be quite creative here.
I hope that this helps.
 Excel Business Forums Administrator
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Confused
Problem with my last post
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I couldn't get the post to recognize the spaces like I thought it would. I know that was painful to read. Let me try again.

Example:
------------------------------
(Name of 1st School) (*5-10 spaces in between*) (full URL of school website) (*line break*)

Address: (School Address) (*5-10 spaces in between*) County: (County) (*5-10 spaces in between*) Phone: (Phone #) (*line break*)

Grade Range: (Grade Range) (*5-10 spaces in between*) Enrollment: (Enrollment #) (*5-10 spaces in between*) District: (District) (*5-10 spaces in between*) Fax:(Fax) (*line break*)

Personnel: (Person's name Person's position) (There also may be additional people listed below or just one person listed with a line break for each personnel and position title) (*line break*)

(Name of 2nd School)

etc.

----------------------------------------------------- There is only a single line break between the last entry in the "Personnel" section and the name of the following school.

Update: the actual number of spaces between the personnel name and the personnel position is between 37-40. So it's not a consistent number of spaces.
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Grateful
Wonderful tool
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Hello,

This really is "One of a kind" program, thanks for that to the developers.

I have managed to input the commands quite succesfully, but I have a problem with how the program overwrites the old data every time I run the extraction. Is that supposed to be happening? How it can be changed?
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Shocked
Data overwriting issue
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The output data is emptied before each extraction process simply under the assumption that the data has already been used. This can either be turned off by commenting out the VBA code that does this, or data can be copied out to a separate workbook for saving after each process is run. 
 Excel Business Forums Administrator
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Confused
Help needed
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Hello, I tried to comment out various parts myself but I didnt succeed on what I'm after. What parts I need to comment out for it to work so that it wont overwrite old data?
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Happy
Preventing the output from clearing
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To prevent the output from being cleared each time the process is run, we can comment out the line:
Call clearoutput 
This subroutine call is near the beginning of the Run_Extraction VBA routine. 
 Excel Business Forums Administrator
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Confused
Results overwritten
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Thanks, but I tried that and it didnt have any effect.

Either it still overwrites the old data or the code doesnt know how to "continue from where it left" as in know where the first datafree line is and continue from there. Copying the data automatically to another sheet after the extract would also work but I dont know how to do that either.
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