


To offer fast and cheap services, those companies employ armies of data entry clerks in low-income countries that do the heavy lifting. There are thousands of data entry providers out there you can hire. Outsourcing data entry is a huge business. Tabula does not include OCR engines, but it’s a good starting point if you deal with native PDF files (not scans). Tabula will return a spreadsheet file which you probably need to post-process manually. You can also use Tabula’s free tool to extract table data from PDF files. The process is simple: Open every document, select the text you want to extract, copy & paste to where you need the data.Įven when you want to extract table data, selecting the table with your mouse pointer and pasting the data into Excel will give you decent results in many cases.

If you only have a couple of PDF documents, the fastest route to success can be manual copy & paste. How to extract data from a PDF Manually re-keying data from a handful of PDF documents
