The PDF-to-Excel date corruption problem isn't a user error, it's a design flaw in how traditional extraction tools handle data. When Acrobat sees "75-01-04" and converts it to a serial number before Excel even opens the file, the damage is baked in at the source. The user who posted this knows exactly what they're talking about: the export process itself is the culprit, not the spreadsheet application. And the workarounds they've outlined reveal something important about the state of data extraction in 2024.
The CSV workaround is clever but fragile. It works because Acrobat preserves raw strings in that format, but it still requires manual intervention. You have to remember to set every column to Text during import, and one misclick means your data is corrupted again. Power Query is more reliable, giving you control over column types at the import stage. But both approaches assume the PDF is well-structured and machine-readable. Scanned documents break Power Query entirely, leaving users with no good option beyond manual retyping.
This is where AI-based extraction tools enter the picture, and they represent a genuine shift in approach. Instead of parsing the underlying code and making assumptions about formatting, these tools read the document visually, the same way a human would. They treat every character as text printed on the page, which means "75-01-04" stays "75-01-04." For scanned PDFs where Power Query returns empty, this isn't just an alternative; it's the only reliable method. The user's post correctly identifies this as a practical solution for the most stubborn cases.
What this story really tells us is that legacy extraction methods were built for a world where PDFs were simple, structured, and predictable. That world no longer exists. If you're regularly dealing with exports that silently corrupt your data, the smartest path forward isn't to find the perfect Acrobat setting, it's to adopt tools that treat your data as it actually appears on the page, not as the software guesses it should be formatted. The user's question about a reliable Acrobat setting is worth asking, but the answer is increasingly clear: look beyond the tool that created the problem in the first place.