Okay. Yes. This sounds like the dumbest question.
I just have a PDF that has a bunch of data in the ugliest possible way and I’ve attempted to pull it into an Excel sheet by myself and mess with the powershell to make it better, but it’s awful, I’m too novice, and I frankly don’t have the time.
This is a personal request, not actually condoned by my workplace, but the data wouldn’t be sensitive. So could I find someone on like fiverr? Or, I dunno where to even look honestly.
Any suggestions?
You could get someone on Fiverr to do it
This is one of the things LLMs are actually pretty good at. Just don’t blindly trust its output.
If I were to use an LLM, it would not be to actually upload the PDF and generate the excel document, you’re guaranteed to have made up data if you ask it to do this. What I would do is ask an LLM to write a python script which uses OCR or some other programmatic way to extract the data from the PDF and put it into a CSV to be imported by Excel.
If the PDF has some sort of data aggregation, like a column for a sum of the data in a row, then do not include that in the CSV output, and have excel do the calculation based on the data the script imported. Then you just have to manually check that the values of that column match the PDF to know if there is any wrong data. Obviously if multiple fields are adjusted by bad OCR but negate each other, the sum column would look accurate while the bad data persists, so some more spot checking or additional aggregation would be needed to ensure confidence with the numbers.
I can help. Feel free to send me a DM
The answer is yes, this is exactly what sites like fiverr are for.
That is, if you value your time more than your money for this, because there’s probably a way to still semi-automate it and avoid some of the work. But yes, fiverr.
What does the PDF look like? Can you not OCR it into something like a CSV, and import it in Excel?
The PDF is a bunch of tables mostly, but it’s tables within tables. I honestly don’t think I care to try OCR into a CSV into python or anything.
I honestly loathe these documents and reading them so I’m happy to just pay for the help
Word can convert PDFs, then its easy to copy the data to excel and manipulate it there
The data may already be selectable text, but usually the formatting after copy paste is horrific.
This is something that CoPilot or ChatGPT is actually good at. Depending how messy your data is you might need to several iterations to get what you want and you will need to cross check the results. If you can, use a pdf editor to delete all the information you don’t want. I use foxit for this. Foxit can also save a pdf as excel but if the tables are an image or are complex it will not format very well at all.
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I used to do a lot of parse-compile-report scripting, and I’m very curious about how the data is formatted in the pdf. Would you be willing to share it?
Other than that, fiverr or an LLM is perhaps your best bet.