You can see that the data “unwinds,” with B1:C1 going to A2:A3 and so on. Here is the original data on the left and how it looks when you paste directly from PDF to Excel on the right. (If you are stuck in a pre-2013 version of Office, I recommend Able2Extract. You can then copy from Word and paste back into Excel. The rows and columns will paste properly. But here is the secret: Paste that data to Word first. If you open the PDF in Acrobat Reader, copy the data, and paste to Excel, it will unwind into a single column. This is annoying, and clearly they don't want you to reuse the data. Say that someone has an Excel workbook and saves that workbook as a PDF.

Here are some examples of techniques that are better handled in Word than in Excel. In those cases, it makes sense to copy your data from Excel, paste to Word, do the command, then copy back to Excel. While Excel fans sometimes tease that Word and PowerPoint are freeware apps that come on the Excel DVD, there are times when Microsoft Word offers a feature that Excel does not.

Katie Sullivan is a Project Manager on the Microsoft Word team.

Export data from pdf to excel