Okay. Yes. This sounds like the dumbest question.
I just have a PDF that has a bunch of data in the ugliest possible way and I’ve attempted to pull it into an Excel sheet by myself and mess with the powershell to make it better, but it’s awful, I’m too novice, and I frankly don’t have the time.
This is a personal request, not actually condoned by my workplace, but the data wouldn’t be sensitive. So could I find someone on like fiverr? Or, I dunno where to even look honestly.
Any suggestions?
The answer is yes, this is exactly what sites like fiverr are for.
That is, if you value your time more than your money for this, because there’s probably a way to still semi-automate it and avoid some of the work. But yes, fiverr.
Yes! Things like Fiverr exist. But learning to use spreadsheet software (I recommend LibreOffice) will be helpful as a long-term skill. If you can find the time to learn it yourself, it will save you time and money later.
This is one of the things LLMs are actually pretty good at. Just don’t blindly trust its output.
This is something that CoPilot or ChatGPT is actually good at. Depending how messy your data is you might need to several iterations to get what you want and you will need to cross check the results. If you can, use a pdf editor to delete all the information you don’t want. I use foxit for this. Foxit can also save a pdf as excel but if the tables are an image or are complex it will not format very well at all.
What does the PDF look like? Can you not OCR it into something like a CSV, and import it in Excel?
Okay finally managed to grab a table or two - sorry for the delay. But yeah this is what they look like and I just need to consolidate this data and format it better haha
Try using an LLM.
I tried to timebox myself with a Python OCR solution, but ended up spending way more time than I should’ve, without ever arriving at a good solution.
I then tried using Qwen 235B via Brave’s Leo AI, and got some okay results (I think you’ll have better luck with commercial AI models; I just don’t have an account with them atm)
