Investintech Partners with Datajournalism.com

Investintech partners with Datajournalism.com

Investintech.com has partnered with a number of journalism oriented organizations and schools to help data journalists work with the PDF data they need with Able2Extract Professional.

As government agencies and organizations continue to send requested data to journalists in the PDF format, it becomes necessary and increasingly difficult to properly pull and analyze the information needed to report, publish, and present facts with integrity and based on evidence.

This is where we aim to help.

Continue reading →

PDF to Excel: How to Exclude Text Surrounding Tables

Person doing spreadsheet analysis

Despite the many advantages of Portable Document Format, users find PDFs inconvenient for reusing the embedded content. To accurately convert PDF to Excel, and more specifically – just PDF tables surrounded by text and other types of content – you need a professional PDF tool such as Able2Extract.

Excel is probably the best known and most used spreadsheet software in the world. It’s an essential productivity tool that automates many tasks when it comes to analyzing large quantities of numeric data.

Performing data analysis in Excel tables is the best way to decipher the information relevant to your personal and business goals that are usually hidden behind the numbers. Nevertheless, presenting those conclusions in an easy-to-comprehend and meaningful way requires textual explanations, graphs, and other various types of content. The end result of an analysis is a properly structured document containing titles and subtitles, text, images, graphs, tables, etc.

Continue reading →

How To Clean Up Large PDF Datasets

Analyzing Data For Investigative Reporting

For big data analysts, working with clean data is a must. The major hurdle, though, is actually cleaning that data. Right now, analysts are spending more than half of their time cleaning up unstructured datasets. And if you aren’t an advanced expert with cleaning datasets, just knowing some basic data cleaning tasks becomes even more crucial.

Datasets can represent a large variety of information. From government and healthcare data to demographic and financial numbers, datasets come from all different areas. They also come in all different forms, like the PDF format. Getting it into a form you can manipulate is your first goal– and your biggest challenge.

The PDF format isn’t easily editable. In addition, it may contain hundreds of pages, consist of tables that span the entire file, be scanned in from a hard copy document, be created from an Excel spreadsheet, or be protected against copying and pasting.

You need to be able to analyze that locked down data. But how do you get started?

Continue reading →

6 PDF To Excel Tips That Will Make You Look Like A Data Expert

Spreadsheet-Analysis

Dealing with a lot of work related documents can be stressful and overwhelming. Amidst the digital evolution, we often find ourselves stuck with a crazy amount of data stuck in PDFs that it’s hard to keep up.

It’s hard to imagine a day in the office without at least one productivity tool to help you overcome the most overwhelming of workloads and  bottlenecks.

It can get stressful, but if you’re a professional who constantly deals with that much information, then you know a trick or two to better organize your work.

Continue reading →

How To Create Excel Pivot Tables

Excel Spreadsheet DiagramWe all use Microsoft Excel for different reasons. It’s a great tool for any basic or complex calculations because it’s so easy to adjust and edit your data. Besides this, there are several important features why someone would be using Excel on a daily basis:

  • To visualize data — Excel charts are not perfect, but they serve a great purpose for visualizing information and numerical data.
  • For checklists — It seems unusual, but people do use Excel to take notes, create tables and lists since it’s flexible, powerful and reliable.
  • To deal with a large quantity of data — Pivot tables and data filtering is useful and can help when you wish to find any info on complex data sets. Also, Excel allows you to perform all sorts of tasks regarding quick data manipulation.

Excel is amazing, but it isn’t surprising that the data imported into Excel spreadsheets oftentimes comes from a PDF document. It isn’t rare to find bank statements, various legal documents, account reports, and other corporate and federal data locked in PDF, data that needs to be sifted through and analyzed in Pivot tables.

Continue reading →