I've been pouring over government budgets today, trying to find something interesting in the California Department of Justice outlays in the May Revise. Thrilling stuff.

Part of what makes this so mind-numbing is the way information is packaged. Nearly everything is in PDFs. So when I'm trying to crunch numbers, the fastest way I found to do it is

1. Copy and paste a long list of line items into a plain text editor
2. manually turn that into a CSV, using find/replace to cut out commas in numbers, then separating cells by hand
3. Importing that CSV into a Google Spreadsheet (there is no trace of Microsoft on my laptop, nor will there be)
4. Crunch numbers

So here's my question to my fellow Wired Journalists: Is there an easier way to do this?

I'm really looking for anything here. A handy web app, a Python script, a better copy-paste method. Whatever.

In the meantime, back to the text editor.