Can a pdf be opened as a spreadsheet?

VikingOSX wrote:

Though this has now been resolved, in the future, one could export the PDF page to an image (e.g. jpg, png) to the Desktop. Quick Look that image, select the table data as text items with a click to get a cursor pointer, and then drag to select. Then, copy/paste into your choice of SpreadSheet app. Just did that on Sonoma 14.4 after generating a jpg image of a PDF spreadsheet. Then into Apple's Numbers.

The selection process of text from the image is mostly successful in Quick Look but there will be a few items in a column that inexplicably do not select, and those will need to be entered manually after the paste into a new spreadsheet. Text selection via Quick Look is like OCR, it takes everything row by row, and in my case, I had an adjacent Pivot table whose content aligned with the main spreadsheet.

That's very good to know!

Though this has now been resolved, in the future, one could export the PDF page to an image (e.g. jpg, png) to the Desktop. Quick Look that image, select the table data as text items with a click to get a cursor pointer, and then drag to select. Then, copy/paste into your choice of SpreadSheet app. Just did that on Sonoma 14.4 after generating a jpg image of a PDF spreadsheet. Then into Apple's Numbers.

The selection process of text from the image is mostly successful in Quick Look but there will be a few items in a column that inexplicably do not select, and those will need to be entered manually after the paste into a new spreadsheet. Text selection via Quick Look is like OCR, it takes everything row by row, and in my case, I had an adjacent Pivot table whose content aligned with the main spreadsheet.

PDF files are intended for printing, not for data transfer.

There are tools and hacks around that can extract data from various PDF files (e.g.: pdfminer.six, on a Mac), but PDFs can contain (for instance) images and you’d need to extract the text from the image with those.

Better… Can you get the data as an XML, or JSON, or CSV? That’s going to be easier on an iPad, but still work.

Depending on how the pdf was created, you may be able to copy and paste the data into a spreadsheet. But, it's going to be ugly and require a lot of clean up. This would be annoying enough on a computer. It's going to be zero fun on an iPad. Some pdf's don't let you copy text.

Ideally, you get the original non-pdf document and work from that.