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PDF has multiple tables, need to extract correct ones

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Posted on by StanM

Hi, I have a large PDF file which contains different types of tables. Each type of table is in the PDF multiple times. I would like to extract only one type of table, all occurences and write to an Excel sheet.

For example, I have a table of outstanding invoices for customers. Each table contains only the invoices for one customer. We have 30 customers, so there are 30 of these tables (table 1) in the PDF.

Within the same PDF there are tables for invoices we owe to our vendors. We have 5 vendors, so there are 5 of these tables (table 2) in the PDF.

I would like to extract only table 2 information. Above each of these tables is text stating "Invoice info for Vendor xxx" where xxx is a vendor number. I can Parse Text to find "Invoice info for Vendor", then retrieve the vendor number with Get Subtext. How do I then extract the table underneath the text? I have tried Extract Tables from PDF, but when I parse the text, I do not know what the index of the associated table is.

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OkanMTL 703 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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Have you tried Document Processing offered by microsoft? This suits your problem better as this uses AI to recognize tables from a File. After your Document Processing unit it build, you can run it from cloud or PAD as you like

Good luck

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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If you do not have a license for AI builder and don't want to purchase it, I can think of a couple of alternatives for doing this:

You could split the document into a separate file per page and then process each resulting page as a separate document. This works best when:

Your tables do not span over several pages,

Each table starts in a new page - no pages with several tables

You could just use Parse text with regular expressions to retrieve the relevant values from your PDF using certain keywords and patterns.

Regex is not limited by the two limitations option 1 is limited by, so it is essentially a better option, but arguably more complex to build. Especially if you are not familiar with regex at all. But since this is custom per document, in order for us to actually provide some guidance, we would need to get sample data.

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StanM 23 on at

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Thank you for the replies.
I took your advice, Agnius, and split the PDF into multiple 1-page PDFs and processed that way. If the heading of a particular page was what I was looking for, I then extracted that page's table.

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