In Summary
People sometimes place a spreadsheet into Adobe .pdf format. As long as the spreadsheet is not being used for corporate data, using this .pdf format works just fine. However, for transforming the spreadsheet into corporate data, it is best to keep the spreadsheet in its native format.
The key reason why .pdf formatting is not ideal is that the special characters at the internal level of the spreadsheet are lost when the spreadsheet is rendered as a .pdf.
The .pdf rendering of data is essentially a snapshot of the spreadsheet. Even turning the OCR option on does not bring back the hidden special characters.
