Tech Tips and Tutorials Archives - Page 7 of 18 - PDF Blog

How to Work with Pivot Tables in Google Sheets

Google Sheets is a spreadsheet program that is a part of Googles web-based office suite. The program represents an online alternative to Microsoft Excel but it’s compatible both with Microsoft and Open Office file formats.

Since its initial release, back in 2006, there is an ongoing debate whether people should use Google Sheets or MS Excel. There’s no right or wrong answer to this. It all comes down to specific needs and tasks.

Someone would praise Google for its simplicity and ease of collaboration. Others would argue that Google Sheets, compared to Excel is lacking in the functionality department

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Make Free Halloween eCards in 5 Easy Steps with Able2Extract

Halloween Greetings eCard

Halloween is just around the corner! By the time you are reading this, it is probably long overdue for you to send greeting cards or party invitations to your friends and family by regular mail.

On the other hand, as a business owner, you might think it is too late to create personal Halloween greeting eCard for your loyal customers and long-time partners.

No need to worry! To share in the Halloween spirit with your friends, family, and business associates, all you need is Able2Extract Pro 11 and a bit of creativity.

Let’s not waste any more time – just follow these 5 easy steps and create your own Halloween eCard!

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How To Clean Up Large PDF Datasets

Analyzing Data For Investigative Reporting

For big data analysts, working with clean data is a must. The major hurdle, though, is actually cleaning that data. Right now, analysts are spending more than half of their time cleaning up unstructured datasets. And if you aren’t an advanced expert with cleaning datasets, just knowing some basic data cleaning tasks becomes even more crucial.

Datasets can represent a large variety of information. From government and healthcare data to demographic and financial numbers, datasets come from all different areas. They also come in all different forms, like the PDF format. Getting it into a form you can manipulate is your first goal– and your biggest challenge.

The PDF format isn’t easily editable. In addition, it may contain hundreds of pages, consist of tables that span the entire file, be scanned in from a hard copy document, be created from an Excel spreadsheet, or be protected against copying and pasting.

You need to be able to analyze that locked down data. But how do you get started?

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Spreadsheet Risk Management: Are Excel Errors Avoidable?

excel errors

Spreadsheets are known for being able to perform heavy-duty number crunching tasks. And because of this, it’s only natural to think that along with calculations comes precision and accuracy. The program is set to do all the complex analysis for you.

Yet from time to time, errors do shockingly happen. This is scary especially when big data analysis in Excel is gaining traction.

It can be hard to believe that a program like Excel could be at the heart of major financial debacles, but it has happened and it has happened in the past more times than you’d think.

Spreadsheet Flaws Throughout The Years

1 Reinhart-Rogoff Paper (2010)

In 2010, Harvard economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, published “Growth in a Time of Debt,” a paper that claimed to have identified a tipping point for government debt and its relationship to economic growth. This paper gave the government a reason to cut spending even if it meant mass unemployment. Yet, researchers couldn’t replicate the results and it was later found that there was a coding error in Excel which, even when corrected, didn’t prove the claim.

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How To Select And Convert Tables Among Text

PDF to Excel Conversion

For the most part, converting PDF tables to Excel can be very simple. Your table is isolated, on a single page and nicely centered.

However, PDFs being what they are and content being as diverse as it is, your tables won’t always be ideally formatted as such in the PDF you’re dealing with. It may be nested within paragraphs and surrounded by extra content and text that you may not need at all.

You’ve no doubt seen this in annual reports, brochures or statistical data compiled into a study. The formatting and layout may be easy on the eyes, but it isn’t on the conversion process.

So how do you extract only the table you want?

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