Is it possible to include an .XLS file inside a PDF, so that the user could open/extract the spreadsheet from their PDF viewer? (Maybe in the same manner MS Word allows you to include a DDE object?) It would not need to show any spreadsheet content or anything fancy like that; I am just looking for a way to have the spreadsheet included with the PDF file.
If so, what tools would I need to do it?
3 Answers
This may be a start until it becomes more clear what it is you are asking. Acrobat 8 (and thus, subsequent versions) include the ability to package files of different types within a pdf file:
UPDATED in response to comment: I did a google search for "create pdf packages" and there appear to be several applications that cost less than Acrobat that offer this capability. I could not find an open source or free option to do this, though. Ghostscript tries to be a pretty full-featured system for creating PDFs and with more research I believe it's the best place to look for open source creation of PDF packages.
The Free (as in liberty) and free (as in beer) commandline utility pdftk is available for all major OS platforms (Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X). It has a sub-command to embed external files into a PDF. Try this:
pdftk.exe ^
original.pdf ^
attach_files file1.docx file2.xls file3.html ^
to_page 3 ^
output file-with-attachments.pdf
The attached files will be indicated to belong to page 3 of the output PDF. To de-tach the files embedded in a PDF, try this:
pdftk.exe ^
file-with-attachments.pdf ^
unpack_files ^
output c:\path\to\directory\
All attachments will then be stored in the named output directory.
If you get cutePDF professional you can embed a file by doing this:
Tools menu > Commenting > Attach file
