It's all about the format:

My city's school district makes images of the spreadsheets and then publishes them in a pdf. USELESS

While deplorable from an accessibility standpoint, at least the data is available and out in the open to the public. One small step in the right direction.

EDIT: Tabula[1] is an open source tool to extract tables from PDFs into CSV/Excel format in case one really needs to process data trapped in PDF documents.

[1] http://tabula.technology

rcthompson

Does Tabula do OCR? That's what would be required for tables embedded as images.

josephfrazier

Unfortunately, it doesn't. From https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula:

> Caveat: Tabula only works on text-based PDFs, not scanned documents. If you can click-and-drag to select text in your table in a PDF viewer (even if the output is disorganized trash), then your PDF is text-based and Tabula should work.