If this truly is a case of Microsoft purposely doing a bad job dealing with Adobe PDF, the animosity is apparently not spread throughout the entire Microsoft Office team. The downside is that 98.5% of your recipients won’t have a clue how to produce XPS files.

One solution, then, is to start asking for your data in XPS instead of PDF. Could it be that the Excel team is trying to boost the popularity of XPS instead of PDF?

However, if you would instead save the file as XPS, copy the table from XPS, and paste back to Excel, you will see that the table retains its original shape, font color, and numeric formatting. The Excel team smartly makes “PDF” the default choice. An unscientific search of Google indicates that PDF has a 98.5% market share compared with 1.5% for XPS. XPS is the new format designed by Microsoft to compete with the PDF format. Notice that the Create PDF/XPS command actually offers to create either the market-dominant PDF format or the upstart XPS format. Round-trip a simple table from Excel to an Excel-created PDF and back to Excel? Is this simply the Microsoft Excel team being obstinate? How can it be that the Microsoft Excel team cannot Paste the copied PDF data to Excel and you will find that the original table is now unwound into a relatively useless single column as shown in Figure 4 (below, left). Next, copy from the PDF document using Edit, Copy, or Ctrl+C. Select the text in the PDF document by using Edit, Select All, or by dragging the mouse. The table will be accurately rendered in the PDF document as shown in Figure 3. In Excel 2010, use File, Save & Send, Create PDF/XPS Document as shown in Figure 2.

Copy data from pdf into excel