MVP #15: How to copy tables from PDF to Excel, the sure way

This is going to be a lifesaver for a lot of people.
In this MVP post, I will show you how to copy any tabulated data from PDF documents to Excel and still retain the tabular form. And this works for scanned documents, ones you can't even copy the text in the PDF.

So let's start!

Below is a screenshot of an equivalent of a scanned document containing a company's financial data.

As you can see below, it's not even possible to copy the texts in the PDF document. If I try to select anything, it simply highlights a rectangular portion of the doc.

So how do I copy the table?
Easy, just follow these steps.
Open the PDF document with Adobe Acrobat Professional. At the menu bar, goto Documents, OCR Text Recognition, Recognize Text using OCR.

A dialog box will come up, ensure that the pages you want to copy data from are included. Then click on OK

Now you're nearly done. It's now possible to copy texts and tables from the PDF doc.
And that's what we are going to do, copy the table in this PDF doc to Excel.

Select the entire table and right click, then click on Copy As Table

Voila! Now you're done. Open an Excel workbook and paste (CTRL V).

Congratulations! You've just done what I have charged clients to do for them.