Pulling Data from a Scanned PDF into Excel

When printed materials are distributed at your next seminar or meeting, or your find a magazine that contains a table that you find valuable, most people scan the document to PDF to save it for later.  Sometimes you want this data entered into a database or added to spreadsheet.  If you can get it to a spreadsheet you can usually import into a database but who wants to key in all that data?  There’s a better way if you have Bluebeam Revu Extreme.

In today’s Bluebeam tip I’ll step you thru scanning a page from an Owner’s Manual and export the part numbers to Excel.

For those who do not want to watch a video, there are two basic steps:

1. Scanning the Document to PDF

File | Create and choose From Scanner or Camera then follow the prompts displayed to select your scanner or camera, page size and document attributes (Black & White, Grayscale, etc)

 

2. Export to an Excel Workbook

File | Export and choose Excel Workbook | Page Region and then draw a rectangle around the data, including the column headings. Bluebeam Extreme does the rest!

 

 

Here are a few other ideas of how you could use this:

Accounting: Import the expenses from a credit card statement so you can sort by expense type and subtotal in Excel.

Business Development: Grab the top business lists from local publications for leads and their phone numbers.

What other ideas will you come up with to export to Excel?