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Power Platform Community / Forums / Power Automate / Extract Pdf Specific D...
Power Automate
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Extract Pdf Specific Data To Excel In power automate desktop

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Extract Pdf Specific Data To Excel In power automate desktop
consider i have 100 pdfs i need to extract invoice number, bill address ,total amount for each pdf to excel sheet row by row.

please help me ASAP

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  • miketran13 Profile Picture
    720 on at

    Hi 

     

    In your cases, if you just want to extract data from PDF with a specific metadata likes invoice number, bill address,... and store it into a file, then you just need to create a Cloud Flow that includes AI Builder form action. So, you can extract the metadata you need and store it somewhere on the cloud. 

     

    If you need to extract data from PDF then you have to perform other actions on the window likes update SAP, Salesforce, or other applications then you should use Power Automate Desktop. But, to do that on Power Automate Desktop, it is a bit more difficult and complicated since you have to use an OCR service on Power Automate Desktop, righ now there are actions for OCR with Tesseract OCR, Google, Microsoft, IBM available on Power Automate Desktop

     

    Thanks and hope it can help you. 

    Mike

    ---------------------------------

    Did I answer your question? Please consider to Mark my post as a solution! to guide others

     

     

  • Community Power Platform Member Profile Picture
    on at

    Thank you for  your information.

    Great answer. But if you consider other RPA tools like UI path, i observed this task is very simple.

    My expectation compare to other tools Microsoft should provide simplified basic solution for many scenarios.

     

     

  • JoeF-MSFT Profile Picture
    on at

    Hi @Anonymous,

     

    Building on the answer from @miketran13, the following Microsoft Learn module will teach you how you can use AI Builder to extract data from invoices and store the extracted results in an Excel file: Get started with invoice processing in AI Builder - Learn | Microsoft Docs

  • wintechchen Profile Picture
    12 on at

    Hi,

    I am able to use AI Builder to create a Form processing model to extract PDF invoice data and then to Excel. My challenge is that financial invoice is created in a horizontal direction, not like purchase order invoice in vertical direction. Also the invoice often might not have all items on the list. That makes hard to know which column name is at position 1.  Any idea to handle that situation?

  • shannonmatesic Profile Picture
    2 on at

    I have the same problem with financial invoices created in a horizontal direction. Did you find a solution?

  • momlo Profile Picture
    1,527 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

    Well, first of all, asking people on community on internet forum to answer something ASAP is not best way to ask question on internet forum 🙂

     

    Secondly, there are other posts discussing this topic in good level of details. Did you search those, what did you try so far? Can you share your code and point where it fails?

     

    Thirdly you have missed valuable information in your question, so it is just guessing what you can or cannot do.

    • Are those pdfs generated from some kind of system, with text layer
    • Are those pdfs scanned papers without text layer
    • Is that mix both?
    • Are those all in the same format? From the same vendor/system?
    • Are those from may different vendors/systems?

    When it comes to reading text from PDF with text layers - you have dedicated actions in PAD for doing that.

    If invoices you want to read are standardised, same format - it is super easy - just use rad pdf text, or pdf tables actions and that is that, no need for AI Builder here.

    If invoices are not the same but still limited number of layers - still no need to use AIB, just read text from PDFs - just create dedicated routines.

    If those are scanned images without text layer - you could use built in OCR, or use AIB wich is extra paid

     

    I would say please answer ASAP, but that would not be nice, so I will not go for that 🙂

  • wintechchen Profile Picture
    12 on at

    Hi Shannonmatesic,

    Not from Power Automate Desktop which is hard to use comparing to Power Automate online solution. I would suggest to use Power Automate online solution as it is much easier and has more connectors that you can do. Plus with AI Builder Form Processing model, I am able to extract data from PDF invoices to Excel or to other output easily. 

  • takolota1 Profile Picture
    4,974 Moderator on at

    If anyone wants to extract data from a PDF or image without training a model for select documents, try this new GPT data extraction method: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Extract-Data-From-PDFs-and-Images-With-GPT/td-p/2201345

     

    It doesn’t require specifying certain document areas, wordings, styles, etc. It just OCRs the file, converts it to a replica text (txt), and passes it to a GPT prompt where you can ask GPT to do whatever you want with the document data.

  • Diaaeldin78 Profile Picture
    2 on at

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