Spreadsheet

This panel appears in Convert Assistant if

Spreadsheet is selected in the drop-down list of the Mode tool, or in the Options menu.  This panel also appears if you click Settings in the Convert Pages dialog box of Power PDF.

The only available output format for spreadsheets is Microsoft Excel.

The following general options can be chosen in this panel: Processing Options (how to handle image-only pages and graphics), Retain Hyperlinks, Retain Headers and Footers,  Retain Text and Background Color.

Two choices that relate specifically to spreadsheet saving:

Look for one table per page

If this check box is selected, the program will find only one table per page. A limited amount of header and footer information can be handled. It will not detect further tables on the page. If you have pages containing several tables, do not choose this option.

Create Sheet

This controls how to arrange sheets in an Excel file. The selection box provides three choices:

Per Table

One table per sheet will appear in the Excel file.
Each detected table is converted and placed in a separate worksheet. All content not detected as a table is placed in a separate worksheet at the end of the workbook, and it is named Overview. This Overview sheet contains hyperlinks leading to the relevant worksheet tables.

When this option is selected, the header/footer selection is disabled, because the generated output file does not follow the pages of the input file.

When to use this?

• If there are two or more tables on a page and the table structures are different: the tables contain different number of columns or their column width is different. Note: If you choose the other option (Create Sheet Per Page) for tables with different structures, the column width cannot be retained.

• If formatting of non-table text is less important. Note: Some formatting - such as multi-column structure, text centering - will not be retained. A whole line will be put in the first cell.

Per Page

One page per sheet will appear in the Excel file.

When to use this?

• If a page contains only one table, or

• the tables on a page have nearly the same structure, i.e. the number of columns and the column width are nearly the same

• If you want to keep textual information together with a table on a sheet. Blocks of flowing text or graphics are likely to be placed in a single cell. If text has a tabular structure such as a word list or an index, each item is likely to be placed in a separate cell.

Per Document

All content destined for a single output document will be transferred to a single sheet. This is useful for handling tables which extend over several pages. It is most useful for documents containing mostly tables with approximately the same layout. It is unlikely to be useful for documents with mixed content and large quantities of text outside tables. Content outside tables is handled as described under 'Per Page'.

If you have multi-document input, the precise result of this option depends on the conversion type as set in the Output Options panel:

1. • If you choose Convert files separately, you will get one sheet per input document.

   • If you choose Combine output into one file, you will get one sheet per job (that is one sheet for the whole output document).

For details on all the other options see Standard Document.

Note

The processing settings are stored separately for each processing mode.

For advice on choosing the best mode for your needs, see Choosing the Processing Mode.

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