Summarizing Large Reports

[wutzke]

Our company's computer system can generate sales reports, but only in
PDF. I'd like to be able to see the sales data in Excel.

Maybe this was the wrong direction, but I was trying to use AutoIt to
run script-macros to translate the data. Info on AutoIt is at
http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3


Starting with a PDF file that contains sales data
(example) Sales Report in PDF
http://dressindustrial.com/geogb8341.pdf

I can use an Online PDF to plain text converter to turn the PDF into
a text file Excel can read
http://dressindustrial.com/geogb8341.txt

The next step is to reformat that text into an
Excel File with Sales Data
http://dressindustrial.com/geogb8341.xls



I'm hoping that someone can help roll this all together, from PDF to
Excel. Any info you have to contribute would be GREAT advise



you can see the autoit script that I was working on at
http://dressindustrial.com/test.au3

 

[Guest]

Hi,
Some versions of PDF do not allow you to import the data in a way that you
can treat it as numbers etc., so it is hard to work with. If you can get it
into Excel, the rest will depend on what you want the summary to look like
ie. summary by account, by region, etc.

 

[Guest]

David,

Firstly, it appears that your 'main application' looks like a unix file and
generally you can access the spool logs for the printers especially, if you
specify a generic text line printer, and grab the output that way.

If you print in the windows environment you can specify a text file printer
which will save the file as a text file. You may need to set it as the
defaukt printer on your system for running the report.

The conversion from text to excel is quite a complex process and you
basically would be better off using a specialist application like
parse-o-matic

http://www.pyrotoinc.com/parse/default.aspx

or

Datawatch's Monarch

http://www.datawatch.com/

With these you can set up code to convert the files easily.

The first one is free but takes more time to learn.

The other solution is to write it in VBA but it is generally a good days
work to get a stable product working and user ready.