Solved: reading pdf files

[philfer]

I get sent financial information in a .pdf file from a different office which I print out and manually input into Excel

Is there any way to automate this without having Acrobat writer

[rconverse]

There is a product called Monarch Professional that can do this and you can control Monarch from Access.

[philfer]

Is there a way to do it from Excel all by itself without needing any other apps?

[malik641]

Is the PDF a scanned pdf, or printed like File-->Print (use Adobe as the printer to make a pdf)? If it's a scan, I know it wouldn't be easy to do.

[philfer]

Its a scan I'm afraid

[malik641]

Well, you can look up some third party OCR software to help you out. I tried looking up some info on it (because I'm not so familiar with it) and the one thing I found that was free was http://www.simpleocr.com/

But the problem with that is it doesn't work with PDF files (at least the free version doesn't), it works with tiff, jpeg, and bmp files. Try it out. If the scanner can create jpeg images you may be able to do something automation-wise (there's a SDK to help you program with Visual Basic for the product).

Maybe somebody else will have some insight for us.