Extracting data from hundreds of PDFs into Excel (and why a converter is not enough)
Adapted from an article originally published in French on closiqode.com. Getting data out of one PDF into Excel is a copy-paste job. Getting it out of hundreds of PDFs is a pipeline problem: identify each document, extract the text, structure the useful fields (one column per field), then check the result. A plain PDF-to-Excel converter breaks down as soon as the files are scanned, badly framed or laid out differently. And there is one rule I never drop: every extracted value must stay linked t…