Thursday, September 14, 2017

Excel Question

I used Soda PDF to convert the FBI's PDF of NICS Firearm Background Checks: Month/Year to an Excel worksheet.  For some odd reason instead of each year being its own row, several years are combined in a single row.  Any idea how to break these into individual rows by year?

3 comments:

  1. The NICS pdf I found is just one table.

    I copied the table from the pdf and pasted it into excel. All the data pasted into a single column.

    Given the few years involved its easy to copy/paste special/ transpose to get a row for each year with months aligned in columns.

    Brute force but pretty quick.

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  2. If it's the form I am thinking of, it looks like the PDF was created from an Excel file, with the cells combined together in blocks of three for the years. You could do all sorts of programming tricks, but it might be possible simply to edit the file in your PDF program to be three separate rows again. Then try to export.

    Youshould know, I have a lot of trouble commenting here, this is the third or fourth try this evening just for this post.

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