Tips for Converting Table Data More Accurately

Introducing Table Conversion Features

PDF Converter product line has updated table conversion feature since version 3.5.0.

Why we need table conversion featur

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If a PDF converter app doesn’t have table detection function, each border will be treated as an individual line element, data in a cell will be converted as text. You’ll only got text boxes and individual lines instead of a real table in the output file.

With table detection and conversion feature, you can easily select the whole table in output folder, move it around, delete it or change the table style directly. If you are familiar with Microsoft Office, you’ll notice the table is widely used in our daily document.

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Lighten PDF Converter apps, including PDF to Word, PDF to Excel, PDF Converter, and their OCR versions, all the apps are optimized for table data, so it can convert table automatically and let you manually mark table areas for the best output result. The best practice of using table conversion features>>

Detect table Automatically
If a PDF file contains table data, the app will detect tables automatically during the conversion. So table can be kept in the output Word, Exel or PowerPoint file. Auto-detection is suitable for table with partial or full borders, it recognize table file mainly base on the table borders.

You can click ‘Show Table’ buttonon toolbar to view the auto-detection result.

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Draw table area manually
The app is smart, but it won’t be smarter than our human brain. So in some cases, it will not detect table correctly if the PDF file has complex layouts. Especially for those PDF file doesn’t have any border lines. For example, following PDF files has table data but there’s no borders at all.

In this case, you can draw the table area manually.

1. Click ‘Show Table’ button show table button , it will tell you where is the table area.

If there’s no table detected, or the table detected by the app is not correct. Please draw the table area by yourself.

(1). Hold the left click and drag an area in the built-in PDF Reader.

(2). And then you can adjust or resize the table area as you wish, please make sure you’ve cover all the table area.

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After marking the table area, when you release the mouse click, the app will detect the selected areas automatically base on the data structure. Rows and columns lines will show up, you can see the cells.

Remember, the output file will recreate table in the same way you see in the built-in PDF reader.

If columns and rows are not correctly detected, you can still add lines by yourself, you can add vertical line for divided a column into two, or split the row by adding a horizontal line.

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If you want to remove a line, click ‘remove line’, more your mouse cursor to the line you want to remove and click on it.

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If the table has merged cells, you can select cells and click ‘Merge cells’ button. Merged cells will become a single cell in output file. If you want to split a cell into multiple cells, you can select and click ‘Split cell’ button.

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With this flexible table marking tools, no matter how complex the table structure is, just like following PDF files conversion, which has many merged cells and complicated layouts, the app can always deliver a well-formatted table in output file.

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It’s tricky, you may need to spend some minutes to mark the table, but it worths the time comparing to manually typing.