It's not as simple as selecting all the text in the PDF document, hitting "Edit/Copy", pasting it into a text file, and importing that text file into Excel (with the proper formatting instructions)... is it?

You should be able to do pretty much what you said. visuvius even linked to some instructions specially geared towards exporting Acrobat tables to a .txt file but it's not that simple in this instance.

I spent 10-mins today trying with his file and there's something wierd going on;
- Acrobat's 'edit/copy' errors with something like "cannot copy selection to clipboard"
- The special table select then save-as .txt file method just produces a file full of non-printing characters

Illustrator 10 warns of a missing font in the .pdf and makes a mess of displaying it which I think is a major clue. I suspect this file was generated by a non-Adobe application and there's a compatibility problem with it's file format.

I'll be having another play with it @ work tomorrow