Nancy Owens from CometDocs approached me about writing a review of PDF to Excel, so here are my thoughts.
First off, I’m a fan of Zamzar, so that’s the baseline that I use for my file conversion experiences. (Check out CometDocs for file conversion AND file hosting, which is pretty cool.)
PDF to Excel.org is a site dedicated to – you guessed it – converting PDF documents to Excel. At first I wondered why I would need something like that. For the most part, I just send Excel sheets to the people that need them. But then I realized that book orders, budget reports, and other documents that are sent by others as PDF files might be nice to edit on my end of things. The biggest benefit I could see would be to grab tables from a PDF and keep the rows and columns.
Like Zamzar, PDF to Excel has you select a file and then type in an email address to send the link to once the file’s converted. I did not download the Able2Extract app featured on the site; I just want the web-based tool. It was able to take a book order that I had submitted for a price quote and convert it into a pretty easily-read Excel file.
One of my complaints with Zamzar is the time that it sometimes takes to register that I’ve uploaded a file for conversion. With PDF to Excel, I got the email saying my file was ready in under five minutes. That may change as more people start using the site, but for now it’s something to capitalize on.
Nancy promised conversion for files up to 40MB – which, if you are trying to convert spreadsheets larger than 40MB, please contact me because I always enjoy hanging out with people from NASA. She also promised that the data gets deleted, which is a must, I think, when you’re dealing with spreadsheets. That’s why I chose a book order instead of something with personal information on it.
Moral of the story? Keep PDF to Excel in mind for that specific type of file conversion. It seems to be reliable for what it advertises to do. Check out CometDocs, as well, for a more Swiss Army knife approach.
