KiloB,
I don't seem to understand what you wrote. In fact, I generally use OpenOffice - I just specified my question in terms of Excel because that's what more people know. I can easily go from spreadsheet to PDF, but don't see how that helps me with the reverse process.
My present plan is to approach the process as follows:
1) Convert PDF to plain text using the Adobe Reader's "save as text", which separates all columns by spaces. But one, and only one, of the data fields has imbedded spaces.
2) Write a C program to process the plain-text result of (1) and insert TABS instead of spaces to separate the "columns". The data makes this look practical. I estimate this to only require 2 or 3 dozen lines of source code. Suppressing the page-header information would be the largest effort.
3) Import the output of the C program to a spreadsheet using TAB as the column separator.
In the immediate term, I imported the 28-page latest PDF to a spreadsheet by copy and paste, so the pressure is off on having long-term automation right away.
Thank you,
seacue