Bio-hacker..

Today I had a 6 hour seminar on office Access in the Library of Glasgow Uni.. and I was wondering all day... Why? Why is there NO free software for pdf conversion to excel or access??? ..After a small google search and some downloads, I found this program called "Able2Extract", which was not too bad for a simple conversion.. but as my friend Dominic described in his blog, our data was still not merged into the cells, so we either had to do it manually, since excel can't keep all text while merging.. or..try and find another way to do it... So I thought I'd experiment a little... first I tried to hack :) the trial version (sshhhhh) Just in case the full version had more options... no success...

I tried to figure out what to do with defining the rows and the columns in each page.. But it had to be done manually, and still needed cleaning in the end ..

After browsing to different sites and some free downloading of trial version programs, I got the most clear result by using Nitro PDF Professional online, which e-mailed me the file with the converted PDF into XLS format.

The data definitely needs more work.. so manual copy - paste can't be avoided... Why am I doing all this?? - Forgot to mention earlier about our Phyloinformatics project decision. We agreed with my friend Dom what we will both work on the New Mammal data provided by the paper published by D.M. Reeder, K.M. Helgen & D.E. Wilson (2007) "Global Trends and Biases in New Mammal Species Discoveries". We will try and apply as much as possible from everything we learned in the phyloinformatics course. We talked about doing all kind of analysis. For now we will clear up the data in the excel and create a fusion table and work with that, while doing some background reading on methods for defining new species. Dominic also uploaded his cool ftw blog http://natureftw.blogspot.com/ so we'll both be reporting our everyday phyloinformatics concerns... Goodnight world of blog.. tomorrow, hopefully more posts of our project evolution..