Creating a SpreadSheet from a PDF File

Some Vendors will provide the user with a nicely formatted Pin Data spreadsheet which is very easy to use with the PartBuilder SPREADSHEET PIN_REPORT_TYPES.

Others will only provide the pinData in a PDF datasheet. Extracting pinData from the PDF file can be quite a chore, but there are some free web-based utilities to help.

Web Based Utilities

There are many free web-based utilities to create a spreadsheet from a pdf file. CadEnhance recommends this site in particular:

https://online2pdf.com/pdf2excel

because it allows the user to select a pdf file and restrict the extraction to selected page ranges 

The Website lets you upload the pdf file from your computer and it will convert the contents to a spreadSheet and download it to your computer.

You use the Scissors icon (highlighted in the orange rectangle) to restrict the page ranges to convert so that the resulting spreadsheet will only get the relevant pinoutTable from your datasheet.

Below we show a selection where we tell the tool to extract pages 5-11 into a spreadsheet.

Cleaning up the Converted Spread Sheet

The conversion from PDF to spreadsheet is not always the smoothest process. The tools are getting better, but there may be strange row and column merges in the resulting spreadsheet that the user may have to cleanup. This is due to the nature of the content PDF document which can be rendered in many different ways  

Always examine the resulting spreadsheet to verify the contents are what they should be!.

In many cases takes just a few minutes to reformat to make the spreadsheet usable, which is far easier and more reliable than cutting and pasting pdf fields into a spreadsheet by hand (a process which can be fraught with peril since the order that things appear in the pdf file are not always the order they get pasted...)

Manually Cutting and Pasting from PDF to Spreadsheets

When manually cutting and pasting pin Information from a PDF DataSheet into a spreadsheet, cadEnhance recommends using the free Foxit Reader PDF reader available

from: https://www.foxitsoftware.com/products/pdf-reader/ instead of the Adobe Acrobat reader.

The Foxit Reader provides more controls for selecting data fields, and does a much better job of maintaining the source data formatting in cut and paste operations. Acrobat tends to mangle the order and format of the data. 

**In all cases, be sure to verify that the order of information that you selected is maintained when you paste it into the spreadsheet. Due to the nature of pdf file structure, the pasted data may come in out of order!

Helpful PDF to Spreadsheet Videos