Stop using Adobe Acrobat to convert PDFs to Excel. Here's why it corrupts your data and what to do instead.

If you've ever exported a PDF to Excel using Acrobat and found that values like 75-01-04 turned into dates (serial number 63923), you're not alone. This happens because Acrobat interprets anything that looks like a date format during export, and the damage is done before Excel even opens the file.

Here's what actually works:

Option 1: Export as CSV, not XLSX. Acrobat preserves raw strings in CSV. Then import into Excel with all columns set to Text before it auto-formats.

Option 2: Power Query. Data > Get Data > From File > From PDF. You can set column types to Text during import, which prevents the date conversion.

Option 3: AI-based extraction tools. These read the document visually and extract text as-is — no date conversion because they treat everything as the text printed on the page. Useful for scanned PDFs where Power Query returns empty.

If you're dealing with this regularly, here's a walkthrough of the different approaches: https://parsli.co/guides/extract-data-pdf-to-excel

What methods are you all using? Curious if anyone's found a reliable Acrobat setting I'm missing.