Power Query - Importing Table in PDF to Excel

Importing a table from a PDF document into Excel can be a difficult process. You might have been doing a copy and paste and editing or deleting our strange characters, spaces or tabs. Whether it was a small table or large one, it's a time intensive process. If you've got the Microsoft 365 subscription (formerly Office 365 or O365), you might have the latest features from Power Query to help make this an easier process. If you don't have Power Query, it still can be done but with another Microsoft application - Word (see that video here at https://youtu.be/COUOvhbQ4CQ)

Create an Updating Dropdown List with Power Query

This video will show you how to create a dynamic drop down list from a table that gets transformed in Power Query. The output table become a source for a drop down list using the Data Validation feature in Excel. You can then hide the output table because maybe you don't want users to mess with it. This is a simple example, but it can be applied to more complex situations.

Passing Input Parameters into Power Query

In Power Query, you can set up a worksheet to take user input, perform calculations or other forms of data manipulation (or transformation) and output a specific table based on the user input. This would be an example of passing an input parameter to Power Query. Even though you could perform this with some combination of functions, pivot tables or slicers, the nice thing about Power Query is that the underlying steps can all be "hidden" from your user and you can just enable a one click does all for your user. This simple example in the video will show you how to pass a user parameter from Excel into Power Query.