Without any special software, there is a great tool called the Alt key. If you want to copy the data into excel a column at a time, you click on the top of the column in pdf and hit the Alt key as you drag across the data in that column. This assumes you have a document with recognizable text. When highlighted, hit copy and paste. Repeat for each column. Yes, this is old style, but it is handy.
I think the reason people are still using paper is due to a lack of good software. In order to do this you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader. And if you want to see how to do it on a Mac, this is how you do it. Now get with a good organization system. Don't have to have a good system if you don't like it. This is for a simple spreadsheet. I have done this with other sheets and spreadsheets. You can see here that the data is still being used at the end. When you are done making a copy of the data, you can paste it into Excel instead of having to use print and save. What the Alt key does. You can see that the user has done some math using the “=” sign in front of the data entry. This is.