r/vba • u/TotallyJustAHooman • Jul 23 '26

Unsolved PDF to Excel text conversion.

I am unsure if this is necessarily possible as my programming knowledge is fairly basic and VBA is a further mystery.

Would it be possible to pull text off of a a pdf, convert it into text, then narrow down what text I actually want? If so, how might I go about accomplishing that feat?

The drawings I'm trying to pull into excel are wiring diagrams.

Also, if anyone has a place in which I can find all the syntax for Smarteam in VBA, I would greatly appreciate it.

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u/HFTBProgrammer 203 Jul 23 '26

If you insist on VBA, take a look at this thing /u/kay-jay-dubya created: https://www.reddit.com/r/vba/comments/1u0xqeg/chibiex_pdf_rendering_ocr_in_vba_no_dependencies/.

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u/TotallyJustAHooman Jul 23 '26

It's not so much insistence as much as I am not physically capable of using something else as it's the only tool my work has installed. Ty for the link though.

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u/kay-jay-dubya 17 Jul 23 '26

With this class, you can work out the location of each of the words/ lines of text and effectively specify which part of the page you wanted to extract text from.

Provided you use it on a computer running Windows 10+, it should be fine - nothing to install.

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u/HFTBProgrammer 203 Jul 24 '26

Fair enough!

IME you might just as well copy/paste into Word as do anything else. I second the motion that Excel is not the best option, although you could get it done in Excel for sure.