More Tools for Scraping PDFs
PDFs are awful, most journalists would agree. If you have a version of Adobe Acrobat Pro, you can convert them into Excel and Word documents quickly and easily.
Many of us can’t afford that software on our home computers or personal laptops, but there are some free options for converting PDF files and extracting data from them.
In the past, I’ve written about how to use Tabula and PDFtoExcel in this newsletter. Here are some other free options for you:
123apps
It’s easy to get distracted by all of the video and audio editing toolsPDF 24 Tools
Edit, merge, split and convert PDF documentsTinyWow
I wrote about this Swiss Army knife productivity tool back in September, but it continues to evolve and add more tools. It has several PDF tools, including a converter and a splitter. (Learn more in the training video below.Google Pinpoint and other AI tools also are useful in scraping PDFs.
Learn more: Laura Grant of the Media Hack Collective wrote an excellent beginner’s guide to extracting data from PDFs
Hey! I work hard to find all these tools for you! Buy me a beer (or a few)!
Around the Web
Companies.tools
App stacks of some of the top tech companies in the world. See what tools they’re using.QuillBot
An AI-driven writing tool that paraphrases what you say.Google Sheets Formula Bot
Type in a sentence describing what you want the spreadsheet to do and the bot uses AI to generate a formula. It can be hit-and-miss at times but it has delivered good formulas for me many times.Foreign Assistance
The U.S. government’s flagship website for making U.S. foreign assistance data available to the public. It serves as the central resource for budgetary and financial data produced by U.S. government agencies that manage foreign assistance portfolios. Data downloadable as spreadsheets.
Data + Journalism Textbook
Samantha Sunne and I co-authored a textbook, “Data + Journalism” that’s available now on Routledge. (Order here). It’s an introductory to intermediate-level guide to learning data storytelling from A to Z.
It features examples, interviews, links to tools and dozens of practical exercises to learn how to find, scrape, clean, visualize and write with data. We also explore ethics, transparency and basic math skills. We even offer a bonus chapter — Chapter 13 — on diversity and inclusion for free on our blog.
In Quotes …
“Only by vigilance toward everyone’s right do we protect anyone’s rights.” – Leonard Pitts
Follow us: @journtoolbox | JournalistsToolbox | Subscribe on YouTube
Copyright 2023 | Mike Reilley