If your preview doesn't get better, try selecting just a subset of your data table. It doesn't work as well to select the table with some white space around it. Revise and experiment with your selection. Often, it works well to draw the selection box very close to the data, even inside the table. Choosing Lattice instead of Stream or the other way around can make a huge difference.Ģ. In the sidebar, toggle between "Stream" and "Lattice." Stream looks for whitespace between columns, while Lattice looks for boundary lines between columns. If your data doesn't look as intended, you have two options:ġ. Sometimes some characters of text are missing, or only half of your numbers are right. Have a close look at this preview of your data. To do so, click and drag to select the table, then click on "Preview & Export Extracted Data" to see how Tabula has interpreted your selection: Trying doing that if your chosen PDF extraction tool is working slowly.Īfter importing your PDF, you can now tell Tabula where the table(s) are on your page(s). Many PDF readers, like Preview on Mac or Adobe Acrobat, let you save one or several pages of a PDF as their own separate file. If your PDF is full of heavy images or is hundreds of pages long, any tool will have a hard time handling it. That's what you will see when you open Tabula:Ĭlick on "Browse" and then "Import" to open the PDF with the data table you want to extract.ĭon't upload the full PDF - just the page(s) that contain your data tables. That makes Tabula great for sensitive data. But don't worry: All your data will be processed on your computer. Once you've installed it and clicked on the tool icon, it will open in your web browser (e.g. Firefox or Chrome). Tabula is a small open-source software that you can download on Windows or Mac.
The first tool we'll show you for extracting data tables from PDFs is Tabula: Every PDF table is a bit different (some are over-designed, some use weird text formats), so if one solution doesn't work for your specific PDF, you can try another one. There are many tools out there that try to solve this problem.
If we then try to copy and paste the numbers into a spreadsheet, the columns and/or rows won't translate: Often, our data doesn't come in a neat Excel sheet or CSV file, but is buried as a table in a PDF, like in this report by the United Nations: This article explains three tools for extracting data tables from PDFs: The open-source tool Tabula and the commercial tools smallpdf and cometdocs.
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