I've converted a BT phone bill from .pdf to Excel via .jpg and OCR, but the results aren't very good.
The tables are preserved, more or less, but £ often comes out as f, and there are lots of other errors.
Use free Imagemagick convert command to get a .jpg for each page.
convert -density 200 phone.pdf phone_%d.jpg
Then I used the OCR software that came with my Canon scanner to OCR each .jpg into .rtf - Omnipage Scansoft.
The table format is preserved intelligently when I open the .rtf in MS Word.
I can then copy & paste from Word to Excel.
I've used this technique very successfully to get my food diary into Word, but it's not nearly as good with the BT Bill.
If you don't have a scanner with OCR software, the recent versions of MS Word - 2003 onwards I think, have OCR capability, but I haven't tried it.
If you're on Linux you should have a whole raft of pdf converters - but those I tried don't keep the document format at all well so the data would need postprocessing. Could be worth a few minutes experimentation:
/usr/bin/pdf2dsc
/usr/bin/pdf2ps
/usr/bin/pdffonts
/usr/bin/pdfimages
/usr/bin/pdfinfo
/usr/bin/pdfopt
/usr/bin/pdfroff
/usr/bin/pdftexi2dvi
/usr/bin/pdftoabw
/usr/bin/pdftohtml
/usr/bin/pdftoppm
/usr/bin/pdftops
/usr/bin/pdftotext
Cheers,
Peter