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The problem here is, the database/report running software we use can not do certain things that we need (total by quarter/person/year, total for everyone for each one of those, etc.) so we have to export it to a PDF and then to an excel Document to get the numbers we need and in a report format that we are able to send to our clients.

What happens however, is these reports are 10-50 pages long, and the format does not work well in excel. I've tried to convert the PDF to text and then import it that way, but because of the numbers and the like, the format does not work at all.

Is there any simple way to bring all of this data in, in a clean format and then deliminate it so that it's easily worked with excel?

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  • so your original data are in a database? Which type of database is it? All decent databases support to export query results into CSV (comma separated values) ASCII text files, which themselves are easily imported into Excel again. I don't understand your detour to PDF. It is a non-trivial undertaking to get a clean, error-free conversion of PDF contents into Excel.
    – Kurt Pfeifle
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 11:43
  • See, the problem is that we use MvQuery and Basys (both which are old and really not worth the time...but they still use them) and in MvQuery, we can generate a report from the data it pulls from Basys, however there is no way to export the finalized data in anything but a .PDF. The original data needs finalized, or it's just a mash up of values.
    – AgainstClint
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 17:01
  • How is the pdf export setup? Obviously a query is happening to pull the data, then writing it to pdf format. So you can query your data in some other way.
    – datatoo
    Commented Sep 30, 2010 at 15:55
  • MvQuery is supposed to be able to export to excel directly, can you edit a copy of the report and change the output?
    – datatoo
    Commented Sep 30, 2010 at 16:10

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You can't just export straight from Basys to an Excel or Access database or anything? And then just query on that to build the report you need? I don't know anything about Basys, but it seems like if you can query that data from another program (MvQuery), then you should be able to access that data from a different program (Access).

But if you absolutely must do it the way you're saying, I suggest looking into Monarch by Datawatch. We use it at my work and it's very good at extracting data from PDF reports.

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  • I forgot to mention, we use it on reports that sometimes exceed 7,000 pages. So this should definitely suite your needs.
    – rufus
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 19:40

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