Does Anyone Use A PDF Converter To Excel

[True Lakers Fan]

Here is my situation - I audit small, medium and large companies up to 44,000,000 in payroll. Sometimes the companies give me the totals on pdf file hard files which I can scan and convert to pdf files or I can have them send me the pdf files. My challenge would be to take those files and convert them to excel spreadsheets, so that I do not have to print out the names, job duties and total earned for each employee

My problem so far is that Adobe appears to be the only one that can do that, but it is a $449 dollar program with only a 3 year license and you have to be connected to the internet to use it and I think they want you to save your work to their cloud. I can't do that because in some cases the names of 400 employees along with their social security numbers are in the documents. Before I can release my work to the carrier, those social security numbers along with other information must be deleted and I will not take a chance in having something like that on a cloud that someday could be hacked.

Nuance appears to have a program and some one in my office has a program that does the same thing - I was just wondering if any has experience with this that can help

 

[WizardHawk]

We used something like PDF converter pro at my last job. Mostly to convert to Word, but some Excel as well. Did a pretty good job depending on the quality of the PDF. Scanned documents to PDF that weren't entirely clear had more issues etc.

I know someone that used PDFzilla for doing some bulk converting and that one is pretty cheap. Think you can get a trail for it.

You are right that you don't need crazy expensive software if all you are doing is basic conversions. One of the packages we used was like $40 and picked it up from our local Fry's Electonics. Can't remember the name of it as it was some brand I hadn't heard of, but it did just fine. A staff member was desperate against a time limit and needed something and that software worked.

Quite a few years ago I know someone that had an excel extension that allowed him to open up PDF's directly through a built in converter, but it didn't have any real features. He was importing formatted automated financial reports and it did the trick. No idea if that still exists today.

 

[TP76]

Plenty of free online converters... however, putting such sensitive info out there would be worry-some. Linux has a free open source program, pdftotext, where you can convert it over to text files, then import into excel. Perhaps that would be the best route.

 

[StanMarsh51]

Tabula: Extract Tables from PDFs