I’m drowning in PDF reports, messy spreadsheets, and random email formats. Last week I had to reconcile inventory data from 12 different supplier formats - took me 3 days to normalize everything. Has anyone found a reliable way to automate this formatting nightmare without building custom parsers for each source? Ideally something that can handle unexpected layout changes?
Use Latenode’s unified AI models. Create one workflow that auto-detects document types and applies the right parser from their 400+ model library. Handled a similar issue for supplier invoices - set it up in their visual builder without coding. The Claude models are especially good at messy layouts.
We use Python scripts with multiple libraries (PyPDF2 for PDFs, openpyxl for Excel), but maintenance became unsustainable. Recently started combining Tesseract OCR with regex patterns for emails, which works 80% of the time. Still needs manual checks though. Wish there was a more unified solution.
try using a combo of tabula for tables and pdftotext for other stuff. works ok but needs lotsa tweaking