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?
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.