I had little success with OCR also. In 2001, when I needed to
convert pdf  to Excel, I looked on the internet and got ICENI GEMINI.
(I could only find two softwares then and one didn't state excel
conversion - just converting to some spreadsheets)
The conversion to excel  had a little more steps. I got it into text
and used vba to transfer  the info into Excel.

The process had some consistent errors probably due to the number of
columns in the source pdf file. Some of the numbers from a row in a
certain column would fill up the the row above it. (I can't quite
remember what conditions caused the situatiton.)
Other than that, it was ok and could be overcome with VBA looking
out for those conditions.

There seems to be a lot more software now that can convert pdf to
excel or word on the internet though I have not tried them.