I have a need to convert columns from bank statements, scanned to being PDF files, to being columns in Excel files.There are several software options available on the webb on a "trial" bases but sadly only PDF2EXCEL creates an excel file which includes much hyrogliphics on a first attempt rendering it practically unuseable whilst producing total rubbish on a second attempt. Others don't even work at all. Hopefully someone can refer me to such software which actually WORKS.

Old Man Delphi

It's unreasonable to expect something scanned to PDF with low-end software to convert well to Excel on two counts:
1. If a high-quality OCR process isn't run at the same time as the scanning and what ends up in the PDF is just a series of PDF images, post-processing is going to have a difficult time gettting much that's useful from them.
2. Unless you use a high quality converter to turn the OCR'd PDF into Excel columns, all you may end up with is a series of numbers/words separated by as little as a single space on each row. As bank statements typically have word alpha-numneric strings spanning one or two lines, plus a number in one of two debit/credit columns, plus a balance column on one of those rows, with nothing to indicate where the text ends and the transaction value begins - or whether that transaction is a credit of debit.

So you have two issues to deal with, the paper to PDF scanning and the PDF to Excel conversion. For the latter, try Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Cheers
Paul Edstein
[MS MVP - Word]

Your bank may have an online download process in .csv format that directly loads into Excel. Have you explored that possibility? It would certainly save the hassle of converting from pdf.

Thank you for that Paul. I am well aware that the banks DO provide .csv files and I make use of the service all the time. My own software imports the data directly from those files. My problem being banks only provide .csv files going back a few months. Leaving me to rely upon usual hard-copy statements beyond that.

Old Man Delphi

In that case, you need a high-quality scanner and OCR software. Most good scanning/OCR software packages do not need to save their output to PDF, allowing you to eliminate one step in the process.

Cheers
Paul Edstein
[MS MVP - Word]

There are a number of PDF converters which enable extracting data from PDFs to Excel spreadsheet or CSV. Google PDF to Excel will get a lot of hits, some are free and some not.

I have used this one with good results where data in the PDF is arranged in columnar format:
http://www.a-pdf.com/to-excel/index.htm

It is not free but has a free trial period.
Its graphical interface is quite easy to use; basically you mark out the data columns in a representative page of the PDF and then propagate it to all the pages containing columnar data. Templates can be saved for future use.

Jock

As I recall a number of years ago, I used the ABBYY converter, to convert downloaded bank statements (pdf files) and it worked quite well one I worked out a system. It took some work and resulted in a well defined process, but it worked.

Skip,

_{Just traded in my old subtlety...
for a NUANCE!}