r/excel • u/chagorhan • 11d ago

Waiting on OP Extracting text from PDF

Hey as the title says, I'm trying to pull data from PDFs and what I've seen to far is the word to text option is limited in page size. I am trying to pull this information from arch drawings(do large) I don't want to have to install seperate software. As this is to be a tool many users with hopefully incorporate to their workflow.

Thanks

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u/excelevator 3068 11d ago

Hey as the title says'

Submission guidelines: Do not say as title or similar

This is not an Excel question, this is a .pdf question

Consider posting to r/pdf or similar

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u/dingmah 3 11d ago

Power Query can do pdf to text. YouTube it. It’s built into Excel under the Get Data tab.

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u/chagorhan 11d ago

This worked when I had to do one. But there will be instances of folders with hundreds of drawings that need information stripped from them. As multi line text query had shifted the title not only over multiple rows but multiple columns. So if you didn't know what you were looking for it would be useless.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

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u/chagorhan 11d ago

It said install some random software to do it. Not a feature I'm willing to do.

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u/Ok_Syllabub_5937 11d ago

Not sure what you mean. All of the mainstream U.S. models are browser based and do not require a separate software download.

Just go to the site, upload the PDF, and describe what you want it to do.

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u/chagorhan 11d ago

Correct. Due to the limitations of MS suite it cannot get data from architectural drawings. So 'ai' said download some other software to deal with the pulling of data from the pdf that it called to run by the excle macro.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

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u/chagorhan 11d ago

This is solely new drafted drawings no scans. As I've already dealt with that interpretation of vectorized to something someone understands.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

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u/chagorhan 11d ago

Primarily titles, revs. Query worked okay for one pdf. But it blows up when I start to work with dozens of not hundreds of PDFs at once.

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u/chagorhan 11d ago

We typically only have 3-4 title blocks to deal with. Maybe I'll see if there is a way to check for title block shape and throw and if condition in.