Forum Discussion

Amiregent's avatar
Amiregent
New Member
10 years ago
Solved

PDFs as a data source

Would anyone have suggestions as to how one could extract data from PDF pages which can then be used in Power BI?
Need Help
  • mllopis's avatar
    mllopis
    10 years ago

    Amiregent,

     

    There's currently no solution to import PDF data into Power BI Desktop. This data source is in our radar, as we have received some requests in the past, but we don't have any immediate plans to add it to the product.

     

    If this is an important feature for you, please leave a vote for it in our UserVoice Feature Suggestions forum. Please also leave a description about the type of data that you need to extract from the PDF document. For instance, are you trying to extract one/multiple tables from the document, or plain text?

     

    Thanks,
    M.

Jam54's avatar
Jam54
Frequent Visitor
7 years ago

As the new release has made the PDF connector a GA, I was wondering the following:

 

Is there a function or script that can make extraction from PDF tables values automatic? such as data scraping from HTML websites but for a bluk of PDFs files?

 

such as;

If I select a folder with PDFs, can it look for tables in all containing the referenced values/words and only download those tables (automatically) ?

 

 

I haven't found a function that enables such.

Does anyone have any advice?

ImkeF's avatar
ImkeF
Community Champion
7 years ago

Jam54 ,

to my knowledge, all tables would be downloaded and then you can filter after their content.

Just create a table with one URL in each row and add a column where you extract all tables first. Then add another column that filters the column with the list of tables (use Table.Contains if you want to search for a word in all columns)

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    Not applicable
    6 years ago

    Anyone know when this functionality will be available for power query in excel?

    • guyhunkin's avatar
      guyhunkin
      Microsoft Employee
      6 years ago

      Hi,

      My team is currently working on this. I hope the PDF connector in Excel will be available for Office 365 subscribers earlier next year.

      Guy

      - Excel Team

      • dverliefden's avatar
        dverliefden
        Frequent Visitor
        6 years ago

        Hello,
        Is there an update on the availability of the M-language function pdf.tables() in Excel?

        Last reply was 'early 2020', today it is end April 2020?

        Thx.

        Best regards,

        Dirk