Community

When working with data collected by interactive PDF forms, it may be necessary to evaluate data in the filled forms - for example, for completeness, validity, and so on. It may be done in many different ways, and one of them is just to review the data visually by extracting data from the forms and opening it in some application that can display it conveniently.

Excel is one of such applications. FineReader PDF 15 can export PDF form data to fdf, xfdf and html formats. The question is how to open data saved in one of these formats in Excel?

xfdf is an xml-based format. Essentialy, an xfdf file is an xml file, and as an xml it can be opened direcly by Excel via "Open" dialogue. Since it doesn't have ".xml" extention, you need to make sure "All files" option is choosen in Excel's Open dialouge, and Excel will ask you to confirm opening because of the file format and extention mismatch. Then, choose "As an XML table" in "Open XML" dialogue, and that's it - the PDF form data is displayed in an Excel spreadsheet.

Alternatively, you can extract PDF form data to Excel directly from the PDF: In Excel, click "Data" -> "Get Data" -> "From File" -> "From PDF". Choose the file of the filled PDF form you want to get the data from, click "Import", and load the data to Excel spreadsheet by clicking "Load "in the Navigator window that opens.