Extracting text/tables from pdf

[Neil P]

I'd like to put my credit card transactions into a s/s so I can see where we're spending our money. The bank doesn't provide csv downloads, just pdf statements. I have tried copy and pasting from pdf into excel but it just gives me one long stream of text, not split into cells, and with no commas etc.

Any ideas? Are there apps that can link to your bank to show you spending patterns?

 

[gintonic]

Which spreadsheet and do you subscribe to MS Office365?

 

[Vinny]

Describing here will not be as simple as using Google to find a YouTube video or animated website.

Depending on your software it is generally very easy to achieve what you want.

 

[Neil P]

Which spreadsheet and do you subscribe to MS Office365?

I was going to create a s/s from scratch on google docs, but do have access to Excel on work laptop.

 

[Nero]

Are you using Ctrl-V to paste? If so, try a right click and look at the other paste options. Also, try pasting to Notepad and then copy/paste into Excel

 

[JensenHealey]

Excel has an 'import' feature that can be set up to distinguish the breaks in the data in various ways (ie not just looking for commas). That would be my first stop.

Using any of the right click 'paste' options is not going to load a long text string into multiple cells.

 

[Nero]

Excel has an 'import' feature that can be set up to distinguish the breaks in the data in various ways (ie not just looking for commas). That would be my first stop.

Using any of the right click 'paste' options is not going to load a long text string into multiple cells.

Yup, you're probably right. Paste into Notepad, save file as *.TXT and then import? Probably by this time, the OP coulda just typed it in

 

[miktec]

I'd like to put my credit card transactions into a s/s so I can see where we're spending our money. The bank doesn't provide csv downloads, just pdf statements. I have tried copy and pasting from pdf into excel but it just gives me one long stream of text, not split into cells, and with no commas etc.

Any ideas? Are there apps that can link to your bank to show you spending patterns?

Use a PDF editor to convert the bank statement ...
Plenty of PDF editors available paid/free:

https://www.techradar.com/best/free-pdf-editor

 

[gintonic]

In Excel -

Data Tab --> Get Data pulldown - From File - From PDF

As to what you get - it may depend on the quality of the PDF your bank has produced.

 

[garyi]

Acrobat does this very well but not the free reader version

 

[Cheese]

MS Word can be surprisingly powerful when it comes to play around with data in columns. No joke, copy your chaotic data into it and try.

Hint: press and hold the alt key, select something with your mouse and look what it does.

Acrobat does this very well but not the free reader version

Another vote for Acrobat. Nowadays there’s no point in trying to do something usable with the help of freeware (apart from a few exceptions like Irfanview or Audacity), in general you get what you pay for. And there are too many viruses and trojans out there for me to download unknown stuff.