I have read a number of answers but am still confused. I have four column PDF table I want to put in Calc.
Waht are the exact steps I need to use e.g. what application do I open the PDF in to make a copy Libre Office ?? Can I jsy copy the paste to reserve the column format?
Any adice please.
I would indeed try copy&paste. Open the PDF in your reader, mark the whole table, copy and then open a fresh LibreCalc sheet and paste it there. What you can also try is pasting with Shift-Ctrl-V which brings up a little dialog containing some options. One of them should be called something like “Unformatted Text” in English. Depending on the way the table looks in the PDF and your reader that might work better than simple pasting with Ctrl-V.
Good luck!
Thank you or your reply but it did not work; all the daat in is column A. If I try transpose nothing shows.
Any more advice please?
Copies derived from PDF or HTML sources often have different characters for spacing. Therefore I would prefer some OCR “rippers” which can transform PDF tables into “working” tables.
Search on the internet for PDF to Excel or similar.
Recommendation: PDF to Excel converter - quick, online, free - PDF24 Tools
Do as the @Grantler says! I was just going to suggest Convert PDF to Excel. PDF to XLS spreadsheets online but have never tried myself.
When I try to download Malwarebytes kicks in and won’t let me download.
Temp turned off Malwarebytes and downloaded. File looks good. Now late in day for me; long hike earlier today.
Will retunr to thiks tomorrow.
Thank you.
Sorry to return to this; must have been tired last night.
When I look this moring I realise that the conversition was not as I expected.
The original PDF has a lot of text in each cell; word wrapping to fit cell.
The conversion has mainly assigned a single Excel row to each line, shown on the PDF. e.g.
Waterways of East London – linear walk (Excel cell B9)
Meet: Stratford station by Robert the Steam Engine. Finish: East (Excel Cell B10)
India DLR station. Walking along waterways of East London old &
new, passing through interesting landmarks and new developments
on the way. There’s a one stop train journey. (Excel B11)
The original file was a*.docx i.e. Word file. If Iturn on Reveal I can see that there is a pilcrow after “… – linear walk” and another after “…stop train journey.” there are no other control characters, exsept the single space marker after each word.
How can I get all the three above bits of text into one cell in excel?
Any advice appreciated.
Can Excel include line breaks in cells? My Excel 2010 can’t; better use Calc format, .ods
You might do better by converting it to Word then Writer file first, then copy the table into ExcelCalc.
You can try using Okular, a pdf reader available in the Ubuntu repositories (at least).
Search in Software Center
or type in terminal
sudo apt install okular
Okular has an option for table selection (top right) which lets you draw a box around the table and then lets you divide it up to the columns (it also firstly tries to divide it automatically but you can override).
You can then copy paste the selection to Calc. It worked pretty well for me,