Every organization, from small-scale enterprises to educational institutions and retail businesses, works with PDF documents on a daily basis. You might have a ton of PDF data from orders, invoices, deliveries, user registrations, industry reports, and other sources depending on your particular environment. These documents may include vital data that support your everyday business operations. Sometimes you might need to attach the PDF files to your Sheet cells and sometimes you need to extract the data from the PDF files.
Although manual PDF data extraction is a laborious operation, there are approaches to overcoming it. In this tutorial, we will discuss different ways to convert PDF files to Google Sheets format.
Using Google Docs to Convert PDF to Google Sheets
Google Drive has in-built capability to recognize tables and text within simple PDF documents. So use this first method if your PDF document contains relatively simple data with few rows and columns.
This method requires the following steps to be followed.
- Go to your Google Drive account.
- Click on New > File upload.
- Select and upload that PDF file.
- Once the upload is complete, open the PDF file (now in Google Drive).
- Click on Open with > Google Docs.
- Select the table and copy it using Ctrl + C (or Command + C).
- Open a new Google Sheets file.
- Select an initial cell in the Google Sheets file.
- Paste your table by using Ctrl + V (or Command + V).
However, there are a few crucial things to remember when utilizing this technique. This approach might not work if the data in a PDF file is stored in plaintext rather than in a table with rows and columns. You risk importing hidden table cells or characters when you copy data from a PDF into Google Sheets. You might need to convert the data into CSV format first if it is in plain text.
Converting PDF to CSV and Then Opening with Google Sheets
For another method, CSV files can also be created by converting PDF files into CSV files. The short list of file types compatible with Google Sheets includes CSV, TXT, XLS, and JPG.
A CSV file is structured with comma-separated columns and rows that include all of the data. In the CSV file, no characters need to be escaped. The number of columns in a table’s row corresponds to the number of table heads that are displayed at the top of each column.
Your objective is to convert your PDF file into a text-based spreadsheet format first, then into a Google Sheets format, so that all of your crucial data will be accessible after conversion procedures have been completed.
The steps below will guide you through this method.
- Go to your Google Drive account.
- Click on New > File upload.
- Upload the PDF file.
- Open the PDF file in Google Docs.
- If the PDF contains a dataset, the content should be separated by commas. In that case, you’ll need to separate each item with a comma.
- On your keyboard, press Ctrl + F (or Command + F).
- Click on the settings option (3 vertical dots).
- Type in an invisible space in the “Find” textbox.
- Type a comma in the “Replace with” textbox.
- Click on Replace all to replace all the spaces with commas.
- Go to File > Download > Plaintext(.txt) to save this file as a .txt.
- Open this .txt file in notepad for PC or TextEdit for Mac.
- Go to File > Save as.
- Type the name of the file with the ending .csv.
- Then click Save.
- Open up a blank Google sheet file.
- In this blank sheet, go to File > Open > Select a file from your device.
- Select the recent .csv file you saved.
- It will now open with all data in the appropriate cells.
Remember that commas typically indicate to CSV files that these keywords belong to separate cells on a table, so we need to be careful here. For instance, you can be in danger if your data contains 1,000,000.
Using Third-Party Online Tools to Convert PDF to Google Sheets
For your other convenient option, there are a number of online tools that can help you convert PDFs to Google Sheets. Several online tools directly integrate with Google Drive and provide out of the box capability to convert PDF documents to Google Sheets.
For instance, you can check out FileDrop where you can easily convert PDF files to text directly from Google Sheets. This method is extremely easy to use and does not require any extra software downloads. All you need is to include a Google Sheet add-on and a PDF file in order to convert it into a Google Sheets file.
Let’s take a look at how FileDrop works.
- Install the FileDrop add-on and click to start it. The add-on will start in a few seconds and it will display as a sidebar with an upload area.
Option 1 – Extract text from PDF
Using this tool, you can extract texts from PDF files by uploading them or selecting them from your computer. And it can extract text from images as well, not only PDFs.
Go over the file in FileDrop and select the TXT icon over it and FileDrop will convert the PDF in text.
- You can insert the text in your Document by pressing insert or just copy what you need.
- There are two options when inserting the text in Google Sheets cells. First, all the text in one cell. Second, each line of text in its own cell.
How to extract text from PDF to Google Sheets Video Tutorial
Option 2 – Convert PDF to Sheet
With this option you can convert any PDF file from Google Drive and keep it’s structure as it is. This feature is available only for paid users.
The process is very simple, open the FileDrop Folder Tools sidebar and enter the file ID. After this step, click the convert button and wait for the confirmation message.
The file is saved in your FileDrop folder.
Conclusion on How to Convert PDF to Google Sheets
No matter what your business needs are for PDF data to be used in Google Sheets, knowing the different methods mentioned above is essential. With online tools such as FileDrop, you can quickly and automatically convert PDF data from multiple PDF files into Google Sheets. For more information about how FileDrop can improve your business operations, contact us today.
