PDFs can be pretty horrible, but you can ingest them through Excel's Power Query these days if they actually have the text embedded. I got annoyed with importi

PDFs can be pretty horrible, but you can ingest them through Excel's Power Query these days if they actually have the text embedded. I got annoyed with importing data for taxes in one instance recently and actually was able to recover all the data from a printable PDF form to then turn into a standard format. There are so many parts of Excel that seem designed by different groups at different times, with varying levels of stability and sense-making, and so I think it takes a lot of experience just to know what exists and when to access it. My approach these days is to do anything I can in Power Query and anything I can't in VBA. And those can connect to virtually anything. I avoid other stuff such as Power BI, the data model, DAX, formulas on worksheets, etc. due to painful experience.