Pulling Data

Ever run across a situation where you download data and they don’t line up properly? Or your data is downloaded as a report with lots of empty white spaces to make your report look nice but is not convenient for data analysis? Or you have a PDF instead of nice data?

Right now I’m helping out a friend with her financials and one of the thing she did was pull her bank statements. One problem: her statements are PDF files.

I’m converting her PDF files into Excel with Adobe but some of the statements get hung up or just takes a while to convert. Worse, the conversion is done in a messy or inconsistent fashion such that my formulas extract correct information only some of the time. So I have to do a little (well, maybe a lot) of data clean up in order to get usable information.

So that is what I’m doing now.

At the moment I don’t have a good answer for this. What I have are formulas designed to extract relevant information and those formulas work at least 50% of the time. It’s better than keying in information into Excel so I will stick with this until I think of a better method.

Okay, it’s time to go back to cleaning the converted data.