Copying a table out of a PDF with PDF by Zaweba

Tables are where copying from a PDF usually falls apart. You select a neat grid of figures, paste it into a spreadsheet, and get one long column of numbers with the headings mixed in somewhere. Then comes the slow business of putting each value back in its cell. PDF by Zaweba copies tables as tables, so they arrive in the next program as rows and columns.

What the app looks for

A table in a PDF is not really a table. It is a set of lines of text placed so that the gaps between pieces line up down the page. The app looks for exactly that. When the text you have selected looks like a table, meaning several lines that break into pieces at wide gaps, an ordinary Ctrl+C puts it on the clipboard in two forms at once: tab-separated rows and an HTML table.

That double copy is what makes the paste work in so many places. A spreadsheet such as Grid by Zaweba or Excel picks up the rows and columns and puts each value in its own cell. A word processor such as Write by Zaweba gets a proper table it can format. You don't have to choose a format; the program you paste into takes the one it understands best.

Three ways to copy a table

The everyday way is simply to select the table and press Ctrl+C. If it looks like a table to the app, it is copied as one, and nothing else changes about how you work.

For selections that don't trigger that on their own, there is Edit > Copy as table, on Ctrl+Alt+C. It treats any selection as a table and splits it into rows and columns at the gaps. This helps with lists that are laid out in columns but only a few lines long, or tables with very narrow gaps between their columns.

The third way is the most precise. Alt+drag round some of the columns and copy, and you get only those columns. When a wide report has twelve columns and you need three of them, this saves deleting nine columns after you paste. It also helps when a table sits beside other text on the page, because the box keeps the neighbouring paragraph out of your selection.

Getting a clean paste

Select only the table. Including the caption above it or the footnote below adds rows that don't fit the pattern, and they will land in your spreadsheet as odd one-cell lines. You can delete them afterwards, but it is quicker to leave them out.

Tables that run across several pages are best copied a page at a time. Paste the first page's rows, then copy the next page and paste underneath, leaving out the repeated header row each time.

Check numbers after pasting. The copy keeps the text exactly as it appears in the PDF, so a figure printed with a currency sign or a thousands separator arrives that way too. Most spreadsheets read those as numbers, but it is worth a glance at the totals before you rely on them.

If a table comes out as one column, the gaps between its columns are probably too narrow for the automatic check. Use Ctrl+Alt+C instead, or Alt+drag round one column at a time.

Everyday jobs it speeds up

This is a small feature with a big effect on everyday office work: bank statements into a budget, price lists into an order sheet, results tables into a report. It sits beside the ordinary text copy and copy with layout in PDF by Zaweba, and it works only on real text. A scanned table is a picture until it has been through text recognition, so there is nothing to copy as rows yet.

For the jobs where a table needs to be quoted rather than worked on, a snapshot may be the better choice. For everything you plan to add up, sort or edit, copy it as a table and let the spreadsheet do the rest.