This is cobbled together from a previous thread, so may not be grammatically correct, but it certainly is possible even with Acrobat Reader to go from PDF to Excel.
In Reader, use the Column Select tool (Shift-V in V5) and select each column of data separately, then paste it into the cell at the top of the column where you want it to appear in the Excel doc. The data should just flow into a column.
One tip - make sure the Excel cell format is set correctly. For example, although the data I was transferring was almost all numerals, Excel did not accept zeros at the start of the figures. By changing the format to 'text', everything came through exactly as it had been in the PDF.
If the text does not appear as it did in the PDF, it probably means that you don't have the font used in the PDF installed on the computer you are making the Excel file in. Highlight all the text and change it to a font you know is on your computer.
If there are blank "cells" in the PDF table, when you copy and paste a single column, the data below moves up by the number of blank cells (i.e. that there are blanks is not understood in the transfer). I found the only solution was to look at each column after pasting, and shift all the cells down one cell below the cell supposed to be blank. I didn't find any workaround to this, but since I didn't have too many blank cells, I just worked through each one individually. It became easy after a while as once I had pasted the first column, it was easy to see where a blank cell had occurred in subsequent columns as the bottom of the column didn't match up to the previous one(s).
It may be easier to do this in later versions of Acrobat.
