This is one of the things LLMs are actually pretty good at. Just don't blindly trust its output.
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
20 points (100.0% liked)
No Stupid Questions
46613 readers
576 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
If I were to use an LLM, it would not be to actually upload the PDF and generate the excel document, you're guaranteed to have made up data if you ask it to do this. What I would do is ask an LLM to write a python script which uses OCR or some other programmatic way to extract the data from the PDF and put it into a CSV to be imported by Excel.
If the PDF has some sort of data aggregation, like a column for a sum of the data in a row, then do not include that in the CSV output, and have excel do the calculation based on the data the script imported. Then you just have to manually check that the values of that column match the PDF to know if there is any wrong data. Obviously if multiple fields are adjusted by bad OCR but negate each other, the sum column would look accurate while the bad data persists, so some more spot checking or additional aggregation would be needed to ensure confidence with the numbers.
You could get someone on Fiverr to do it
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.
What does the PDF look like? Can you not OCR it into something like a CSV, and import it in Excel?
Word can convert PDFs, then its easy to copy the data to excel and manipulate it there
The data may already be selectable text, but usually the formatting after copy paste is horrific.
The PDF is a bunch of tables mostly, but it's tables within tables. I honestly don't think I care to try OCR into a CSV into python or anything.
I honestly loathe these documents and reading them so I'm happy to just pay for the help
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.
I can help. Feel free to send me a DM
I used to do a lot of parse-compile-report scripting, and I'm very curious about how the data is formatted in the pdf. Would you be willing to share it?
Other than that, fiverr or an LLM is perhaps your best bet.