We are excited to announce a new and exciting update to Get & Transform Data capabilities in Excel – PDF data connector! This has been one of the top requests from you and we heard you. With the new From PDF connector you can connect to PDF files, and use the included data from the file, just like any other data source in Excel.
The new From PDF connector is available as part of an Office 365 subscription. If you are an Office 365 subscriber, find out how to get the latest updates.
The following sections describe how to connect to a PDF file, select data, and bring that data into Excel.
Connect to a PDF file
To connect to a PDF file, open the Get Data menu from the Data tab on the ribbon. Select From File and click From PDF.
You are prompted to provide the location of the PDF file you want to use. Once you provide the file location and the PDF file loads, a Navigator window appears and displays the list of tables and pages in the document that you can import the data from.
You can browse through the PDF document data and select one or multiple elements to import into Excel. When you are ready to import, select the Load button to bring the data into Excel, or Transform Data to clean your data and prepare it for analysis with Power Query Editor.
Advanced scenarios
In some cases, you may want to import a range of pages from a PDF document at once. For this, you can specify the Start page and End Page as optional parameters for your PDF connection in the underlying M formula from the Power Query Editor:
Pdf.Tables(File.Contents("C:\Sample.pdf"), [StartPage=5, EndPage=10])
For more information, refer to the Pdf.Tables M function documentation.
We hope you will like this new addition to Excel and we’d love to hear what you think about it. Please click File > Feedback and let us know. We’re excited to hear from you!
Guy Hunkin
– Excel Team
Microsoft
