Idon’t use Microsoft Excel all that often, so it remains a bit of a mystery to me. I can enter text and create graphs and that’s basically it. That’s why I’ve set myself a goal to learn one new Excel trick every week.

This week, I’ve learned how to successfully copy data from a PDF table into a spreadsheet. It sounds easy and straightforward, but it’s not. The few times I’ve attempted this in the past were a disaster.

It turns out that I tried to do what most people do — that is, I tried to copy and paste directly from the PDF itself. But that just results in the text being copied over with formatting all askew. No, a better way to do it is to use Excel’s built-in data copying feature. Not only is it simple and easy to do, but the data will be copied over with perfect formatting as well.

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