PDF documents are among the most widely used types of files, but they have shortcomings too. Converting a PDF to an Excel spreadsheet instead could save you time and help you avoid pitfalls that could make your productivity plummet.
Here are six ways you can keep your productivity going by performing a PDF-to-Excel conversion.
Converting PDF to Excel is always a tedious task. With the large amount of rows and columns of data you have at your fingertips, the ability to work efficiently with your tables is important.
The custom PDF to Excel feature, as you well know, is aimed at giving you a user friendly way to gain as much control over the data conversion as possible.
You learned about Able2Extract’s Smart and Master templates feature last week, which helps the software to automatically identify and select specific table structures for quicker conversions into Excel.
Well, this week we’re going to unpack three other custom PDF to Excel features: Find Similar, Review Tables, and Show Highlights.
All three of these features further complement and assist the way in which you interact, navigate, and view selected table structures and the data which they contain.
Last week, we introduced you to Able2Extract’s new Smart Templates feature in the first part of this series, How to Custom Convert PDF to Excel with AI Technology: Smart Templates. This week, we’re going to cover Master Templates and how they work to further enhance your batch conversions.
We all know that batch converting multiple files to Excel at the same time is fast and efficient. Now, imagine having a number of PDFs and being able to automatically batch convert only the specific PDF tables you need. That would be a great time saver, indeed!
The only problem to figure out, though, is how to select those tables from a number of separate files for batch conversion. The closest we’d be able to get using regular methods is to open all files, select the specific table in each one and convert one file at a time, which would be time consuming.
From a batch conversion perspective, though, automating the data selection makes more sense – and this is where a Master Template steps in.
This comes in handy if, for instance, you’re a retail manager who exports monthly reports on all in-store products for 2018 into separate PDFs (one for each month). When you need to analyze the data for the sale of a specific product over the entire year, a Master Template can help Able2Extract to identify, select and convert that specific dataset from all of your 2018 monthly PDF reports in one sitting.
To do this, though, you first need to train a Master Template. This is what we’ll cover in today’s post.
As you well know, Able2Extract Professional 14 went above and beyond this year. It included the ability to sign PDF files, but it also came with artificial intelligence baked right in. The move may seem strange for a PDF converter, but it isn’t.
We’ve added AI technology to help tie both Able2Extract’s table selection capabilities and Custom Excel Templates closer together. We’ve made it so that you can boost and train those Excel templates into “Smart” and “Master” Templates. These templates can then be used by Able2Extract to automate how you select table structures for conversion.
When put into real-life context, this gives you more flexibility and power. You may have credit card statements in the PDF format, for example, where the table columns (date, amounts, transaction type) are all the same, yet the tables may vary in length (the number of transactions may differ from one table to the next) or occur on different pages.
In other words, you have the same table structure peppered across the PDF on non-consecutive pages. Selecting each of those tables for conversion becomes a challenge. It becomes an even more tedious task when extra text and other tables get in the way. This is what the new AI engine in Able2Extract aims to help you with.
In the first of this short two-part series, we’re going to show you how Smart Templates work. Let’s begin.
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.