Ohio law is fairly clear. The public, including journalists, has the right to request public information in the format in which it is maintained. However, it seems a lot of government folks insist on responding to requests by providing a PDF. That’s no good if you want to crunch the data..

You can fight them. But sometimes it isn’t worth the time, if there is a quick solution.

There are many options out there to convert PDF files to database files. But I wanted to share one that’s been working great for me. It’s fast and it’s free. The website is www.pdftoexcel.org. Notice, the dot-org.