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 and make sure it looks usable.
In most cases it might take a few minutes to reformat to make the spreadsheet usable, but it is far easier and more reliable than cutting and pasting pdf fields into a spredsheet by hand (which can also be fraught with peril!)
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