A weaving mill's planning team spent 10 to 12 hours copying yarn demand sheets from PDF into Excel. Now the same batch becomes one checked, branded workbook in a few seconds.
Every month, a planning team member at a weaving mill in Pakistan did the same job: open a yarn demand sheet PDF, find a field, copy it, paste it into Excel, and repeat. 42 fields per sheet. About 8 to 10 minutes per page.
A recent batch had 73 sheets. That is 10 to 12 hours of copy-paste, almost a day and a half of work, before anyone could start the actual planning.
Today she selects the PDF, clicks one button, and the finished Excel report opens a few seconds later.
Project at a glance: steps, technology and results on the PDF to Excel project page.
The problem: reports come as PDF downloads, but planning happens in Excel
The team downloads each yarn demand sheet from the ERP as a PDF: sales contract, customer, construction, quantities, A and B grade, reed, speed, shed, and warp and weft bags. Management wanted all of it in one spreadsheet to plan production and yarn.
Doing that by hand caused more than lost time:
- Typing errors. In one hand-built sheet we reviewed, a total of 254,115 had been typed as "254,11".
- Numbers stored as text, so sums and filters quietly gave wrong answers.
- No one re-checked the totals on the PDF, so a mistake in the PDF went straight into the plan.
- Different layouts from different people, so reports never lined up.
What we built
A small Windows app, a single file with no installation and no internet needed, that does the whole job in three steps:
- Select the PDFs: one file, a folder, or one merged PDF of 73 pages.
- Add the branding: report heading, company name and logo (remembered for next time).
- Click "Create Excel Report".
Behind that button, a reader built for the exact demand sheet layout pulls every field from every page. It then adds up the PDF's totals again (warp plus weft bags, A plus B grade) and flags any mismatch in red.
What comes out
From the 73-page PDF, the app produced one workbook with:
- 73 rows, one per demand sheet, and about 3,000 fields, with real numbers and dates that filters and pivot tables can use straight away
- A summary sheet covering 59 sales contracts and 15 customers, broken down by customer, by fabric type and by shed
- A status line for every file, so nothing is silently skipped
- Zero check warnings. Every PDF total added up
- Live Excel formulas, so correcting one value updates the summary at once
And because it runs entirely on the PC, confidential contract and customer data never leaves the building.
The result
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Time for 73 sheets | 10 to 12 hours | A few seconds |
| Fields entered by hand | About 3,000 | None |
| Total checks | None | Every sheet, automatically |
| Report layout | Different for each person | The same branded workbook every time |
The planning team now spends its time on what the numbers mean, not on typing them.
Could this work for your documents?
The same approach works for any report your systems export as PDF: sales tax invoices, delivery challans, gate passes, test reports, contracts. Where a layout repeats, we build an exact reader for it. For everything else, a general reader picks up labelled fields and tables automatically.
Send us 2 or 3 sample PDFs of a report your team copies by hand, and we'll return a finished Excel workbook built from them. Book a free discussion or see the project details.
