i am new to excel and need help thanks!

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Guest

first off thanks you guys for taking the time to help. i have got alot of
info from the forums. ok here is my latest adventure! i am trying to create a
list of phone numbers for my boss. he asked me to pull out every phone number
on his phone bills and make a list using excel. now his bills are in PDF
formatt and i have purchased a PDF to excel converter and it works great, my
issue is once im in excel i want to extract or copy all the phone numbers, is
that possible? so far ive just been able to delete alot of unwanted text and
contect that carries over from the PDF and narrow it down to only 2 colums (A
and B) but there is still a few things i dont need like text that reads
"incomig" ect and ive been deleting row by row and sometimes there are 1200+
rows and thats just taking way to much time. im thinking there has to be a
way that once i have all the data in excel i can just copy all the phone
numbers in the doc? im using office pro 03, can someone help this girl out?
thanks
 
Hi!

Post a good sized representative sample of your data.

Extracting substrings from text entries is usually not too
difficult(most of the time) but we definitely would need
to see a sample of the data.

Biff
 
Tina,

One of the things you should try is...
Data | Text to Columns

You may be able to separate the phone numbers
into just one column.

Also, it could be possible to write a macro to extract just the
numbers, assuming that there are no numbers in the extra data.


Jim Cone
San Francisco, USA
 
i dont know how to post a sample, can i email you or someone a sample to see
how i can do this? thank you very much!
 
Hi Tina,
Posting an example out of PDF may be a little bit further
off track in this case. Though normally failure to post an
example is a major bottleneck in getting a quick answer,
I don't think it applies in this case.

If I understand your problem, you did not need to
purchase software if to copy a single column of telephone
numbers from a PDF file.

You can use the free Acrobat Reader from adobe.com
which basically everyone is forced to install sooner or later.

From my http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/pdf.htm webpage.

With the Free Acrobat Reader you have to select one column at a time from the table.
Ctrl+v or look for boxed [T] for Text and use the drop down box to select Column Select Tool (Ctrl+v)
Select the column from the table in acrobat, and paste into Excel. Carefully select the next column so everything lines up with the
previous Column Select and Paste operation.

So yours is a lot simpler, since you only want one column.

Your next problem might be to eliminate duplicate telephone numbers
and for that you might want to use a filter or take a look at
Duplicate And Unique Items In Lists (Chip Pearson)
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/duplicat.htm
or better using a filter see Debra Dalgleish's
http://www.contextures.com/tiptech.html
but I don't see an example, I did a search which turned upturned up
Find & Remove Duplicates - Dedupe Excel Tables / Lists
http://www.digdb.com/excel_add_ins/duplicates_find_remove_dedupe/
 
Tina
You've gotten some good ideas already, but before you start tearing your
hair out, if you wish, send me an example of what you have and include an
example of what you want to have. My email address is
(e-mail address removed). Remove the "nop" from this address. HTH Otto
 
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