Showing posts with label file conversion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label file conversion. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Free and Fast Way to Accurately Convert PDFs to Excel Files

Anyone working with tabular data on a regular basis knows that Microsoft Excel is the preferred program for manipulating this type of material for most people. The Excel spreadsheet is an industry standard when it comes to presenting numbers or statistics and working with them. And while Excel is the most popular program for using this type of material, you might not always receive this data from others in the Excel format.

It’s not uncommon for people to convert tabular data to PDF before sending it to others. PDF is not only easily compressed into a small file size and, therefore, easy to send and transfer, but it is also a universal file format that appears identically on every platform. But with all of these advantages of the PDF, it has one fairly big disadvantage – it’s hard to edit.


So if this does occur to you on a regular basis and you need to convert your PDFs into Excel, thankfully, there are ways to do so effectively and cost free.

PDFtoExcel.org is one tool that enables users to quickly turn their PDFs into Excel files, without losing any of the formatting and structure of the PDF document.

pdf to excel


For a free tool, it’s incredibly accurate with its conversions, and it’s also very easy to use.

To use the tool, click Browse to find the PDF file on your computer that you want to have converted. 


Now simply enter your email and click Send – that’s it!




In a matter of minutes, your converted Excel file will be ready. An email with a link to your downloadable Excel file will be sent to the address that you specified.



The accuracy of the service is what really sets it apart from many other free services. When converting from PDF to Excel, it’s important to get accurate conversions so that the formatting of the cells and rows is preserved. This saves you a lot of time that you could potentially have to waste on editing the converted file further before being able to use it.

The tool is not only incredibly accurate in its conversions, but it’s also very secure and safe to use. Your email address and files will be deleted from the server permanently 24 hours after the conversion has been completed.

For anyone looking for a free and fast way to accurately convert PDFs to Excel files, PDFtoExcel.org is definitely one of the best online tools available for this purpose.

This guest post was written by the nice folks at PDFtoExcel.org. Do check out their tool and let me know if it worked for you in the comments below.

Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Make a PDF smaller in Mac OS X without any fancy tools

This has been frustrating me for a while. While Preview is an awesome bundled tool and all, it seems to think it is acceptable to create HUGE PDF files.

In order to not be hated by my EMail recipients, (see this comic strip: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/email), I tried to make the file size smaller. Here's what I tried and failed.

Also; Being the stubborn ass that I am, I wanted to do this without installing any extra tools.


My Original Size: 7 Pages of typed letter (i.e. a signed NDA agreement) at 3.8Mb (Ridiculous)

Attempt 1:
Open PDF in preview, click on File->Save As, Select 'PDF' and Quartz Filter=Black and White.

Fail: The size reduced to 594kb, but most of the text was faded out or missing. Not good.


Attempt 2:
Same as above; Open PDF in preview, click on File->Save As, Select 'PDF' but this time Quartz Filter=Reduce File Size.

Fail: Size was amazingly 217kb, but nothing could actually be read since the text had been totally blurred out. Not acceptable.


Attempt 3:
Same as above; Open PDF in preview, click on File->Save As, Select 'PDF' but this time Quartz Filter=Grey Tone.

Fail: Size was a whopping 15Mb.

Things were starting to get annoying.


So here's what finally solved it. Which is not pretty by any means.

1. Export each and every page in the PDF to JPEG format one by one.

2. For each new JPEG file, click on Save As->JPEG, then set the quality nearer to the 'Least' setting on the slide. Mine made each file about 100kb each.

3. Recreate the PDF by opening the first JPEG file in the series in Preview, then clicking View->Sidebar-Show Sidebar. Then drag and drop each of the JPEG files into the sidebar in order.

4. Select all the images in the Sidebar and then click on File->Print Selected Images.

5. Click on PDF-Save as PDF to create your new file.


My final file was 700kb and just as readable as the original.


Finally a win. Albeit a pyrrhic win.


For more about manipulating PDF files, try these following posts:

Free and Fast Way to Accurately Convert PDFs to Excel Files

Printing to PDF with doPDF

Concatenating PDFs with Ghostscript

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Converting WAV to MP3

By using ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i file1.wav -ac 2 -ab 64 outputfile.mp3


A windows build for ffmpeg can be grabbed from: http://arrozcru.no-ip.org/ffmpeg_builds/


Sunday, March 30, 2008

Opening a .ai File without Adobe Illustrator

If you don't have Adobe Illustrator, your options for opening a .ai file are:

1. Adobe Acrobat Reader

2. XnView. Available from http://www.tucows.com/preview/290806




Monday, February 04, 2008

SOX WAV to GSM Conversion Again

This way seems to work best for me, without the speed being effected (i.e slow, fast, half speed, etc)

sox -t wav input.wav -r 8000 -c1 -t gsm output.gsm resample -ql