Last time in this series, I gave you a sense of what you could do with your Excel conversions. With the Excel Special option, you could tailor the file output of your PDF to Excel conversion. With the Excel Custom Conversion option, you were able to designate a specific Excel document structure. What else can you do?
As if these features weren’t enough, there are Excel output options available that let you customize the Excel document’s appearance. This last posting in the series will give you an introduction to some of the features that allow you to do just that.
Under The View Menu
The following features can be found under the View menu, and will need to be set before you perform the actual conversion.
*Excel Single Worksheet—This option is set on as a default. It will convert PDF pages of your PDF to a single worksheet. Uncheck it, and it will convert each page of a multipage PDF into a workbook of separate worksheets.
*Excel Fonts—If your PDF has special fonts or colours and you need to retain them, turn this option on. If not, the PDF to Excel converter will use MS Excel fonts.
* Excel Spacing—This feature will modify the spacing of the columns of your conversion.
Options And MS Excel Output
There are also other options that can further tailor the appearance of your data conversion. To set these from the View>Options. . . . Here’s a listing of what you can do with the Output options:
*Trailing Minus Sign Treatment—Negative values are sometimes displayed with the negative sign to the right of the number. This function will let you convert the document with the minus sign at the beginning of the line.
*European Continental Settings—In some cases, the function of the decimal and the comma is reversed, where, for example, “1.000” represents one thousand and “0,85” for the equivalent 85/100, indicating a fractional value. This function will reverse that notational function to mean “1,000” and “0.85”.
*Enable Choose Column Type Dialog (Custom Excel Conversion)—When this is selected, you can use text formatting to store the values, skip columns altogether, or use default formatting.
*Enable Table Unfolding (Treat Rows As Columns And Vice Versa)—If you need to change the table set up, turning this function on will let you change the column headings into rows, and vice versa. The cell data will also be rearranged accordingly with the column and row headings to retain the integrity of the table.
*Retain Dollar Sign As Separate Symbol—Use this option to retain separate “$” symbols in the converted document.
And our upgraded version has a few extra Excel conversion features that might also come in handy:
*Use Text Format For Dates—When converting some documents, dates may be converted into numbers. Turn this function on to preserve the date in Text.
*Load Custom Excel Template and Save Custom Excel Template—With these features, you can save any custom conversion you make as a template. Select Save Custom Excel Template from the File menu once you have the column and row lines in the desired place. To use it later on, simply load it with the Load Custom Excel Template option when you convert tables with similar formatting.
A few tips about these functions:
*The Excel spacing will affect the appearance of the information within the cells. Depending on your data, some textual information may get cut off. Conduct a few trial tests with this option first for the visual output you want.
*Setting the features will be applied to all documents that are opened afterwards once it is set as the default.
*Using the Enable Custom Column Type to choose Text formatting for columns, the affected columns and cells in the spreadsheet will be noted in the Excel manner--with an indicator and with the value aligned to the left of the cell.
*When saving a custom template, the headers and footers you set are kept. Thus, if the template is being used for tables with similar column patterns, but varying lengths, you will need to make minor readjustments before you convert.
If you haven’t tried these features out yet, just take the time out to fiddle around with them, see what works best for your documents. You’ll be converting like a pro in no time!
