Yes. You need an OCR program. I use Scansoft Omnipage

I'm extremely wary of OCRs...

Everything I've done so far I've had to go over and sometimes checking is
more time than retyping I think.

Have you had good results so far?????

Anyone else have OCR experiences to share?????

OCR depends soooo much on the quality of an original. If it is a PDF it seems
to come over OK most of the time. However If there is a background image or
watermark that can mess it up. If the original is a fax it gets it wrong a
lot. A clean unfolded laser-printed document  in Times New Roman comes over
pretty close to 100%

I think there are two ways PDFs store text - as text streams or as images. It
seems the text streams OCR better.

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.

I'm extremely interested in knowing more about this, since it's
relevant to some of the things going on here . . . looking around
the web, I have gotten a lot of very confused information, so any
one with experience like this, I'm interested in hearing about it.
But, one question:

Are all of you speaking of printing out the PDF and then
scanning it? . . . if that's not what you mean, please explain. If
that is what you mean, can it be done without the print out/scan
steps?

The OCR program opens the pdf  as a source and then scans it and outputs the
result as an excel  workbook.

The PDF file is opened in Acrobat. As an add in, Gemini converts the
data from the PDF file into text.

If you are using Omni Page Professional 15, you could use the PDF converter
to open the PDF file and convert it directly to Excel. Set the option to
convert all the pages to Excel. Each PDF page will be assigned to a
corresponding worksheet and then you can edit the columns as you wish.

do you have any problem with Omni Page Pro 15 like has been
mentioned above? . . . or is a pretty clean conversion?