This panel appears in Convert Assistant if Spreadsheet is selected in the drop-down list of the Mode tool, or in the Options menu. This panel also appears if you click Settings in the Convert Pages dialog box in Power PDF.

The only available output format for spreadsheets is Microsoft Excel.

The panel has the following sections:

• Layout options

• Retain options

• Processing options

• Handling Graphics options

• Look for one table per page: If this check box is selected, the program will find only one table per page. A limited amount of header and footer information can be handled. It will not detect further tables on the page. If you have pages containing several tables, do not select this option.

• Create Sheet: This setting controls how to arrange sheets in an Excel file. The selection box provides the following options:

  • Per Table: One table per sheet will appear in the Excel file. Each detected table is converted and placed in a separate worksheet. All content not detected as a table is placed in a separate worksheet at the end of the workbook, and it is named Overview. This Overview sheet contains hyperlinks leading to the relevant worksheet tables.

    Note When this option is selected, the header/footer selection is disabled, because the generated output file does not follow the pages of the input file.

    Use this option if:

    • Two or more tables exist on a page and the table structures are different: the tables contain different number of columns or their column widths are different.

      Note If you select the other option (Create Sheet Per Page) for tables with different structures, the column width cannot be retained.

    • Formatting of non-table text is less important.

      Note Some formatting, such as multi-column structure and text centering, is not retained. An entire line is put in the first cell.

  • Per Page: One page per sheet will appear in the Excel file.

    Use this option if:

    • A page contains only one table.

    • The tables on a page have nearly the same structure, such as the number of columns and the column width are nearly identical.

    • You want to keep textual information together with a table on a sheet. Blocks of flowing text or graphics are likely to be placed in a single cell. If text has a tabular structure such as a word list or an index, each item is likely to be placed in a separate cell.

  • Per Document: All content destined for a single output document will be transferred to a single sheet. This is useful for handling tables which extend over several pages. It is most useful for documents containing mostly tables with approximately the same layout. It is unlikely to be useful for documents with mixed content and large quantities of text outside tables. Content outside tables is handled as described under Per Page.

    If you have multi-document input, the precise result of this option depends on the conversion type as set in the Output Options panel:

    • If you select Convert files separately, you get one sheet per input document.

    • If you select Combine output into one file, you get one sheet per job (that is one sheet for the whole output document).

For details on other options, see Standard Document.

For advice on selecting the best mode for your needs, see Select the Processing Mode.