Office 365: Excel Power Query just freezes evey time

In Microsoft Office 365, I'm trying to use Excel Power Query to import a table from a PDF page. That's supposed to work. But when I try to do the import, Excel just freezes for good. I have to kill it with the Task Manager. I tried clearing the Power Query cache and doing a Quick Repair of Office 365, but neither step helped.

Anybody ever encounter something like this and know what to do about it?

FWIW, I've got Windows 10 Home 20H2, build 19042.1348

Hi,

I don't really know how to fix this because of the innumerable "Types" of tables you can find in a PDF file (true tables, up to jpgs images passing by Spreadsheet files and other DBs tables supported ).

It depends on how PDF was created. For example, you scan the document into a PDF, then Power Query will recognizes nothing in it. It should be an initial document with tables converted to pdf, or pdf created from scratch by Adobe tools. some PDF will simply not work and other will crash PQ.

If you have Acrobat Pro you can try to Extract tables from the PDF, then try to bring them in Power Query.

The PDF file that I have is NOT a scanned document. It was apparently generated from Microsoft Word at some point. I can copy the tabular information and paste it into another document. PowerQuery is supposed to work on such PDFs, but it doesn't. I'll take your advice and manually copy the tabular information into an Excel spreadsheet and be done with it.

Thank you for your help.

You can try to Re-Export the PDF from word if you still have the document, and choose another type of Pdf when saving. But most of the time when I get things like that, to save time and aspirin, they often end up with some kind of workaround.