It's a bit of a minefield, as you need to have all of the fonts that are within the pdf also installed on your machine.
Other things like formatting can mess things up too.
Copy and pasting is not the best, so you may have to acquire specialist pdf software; but I know that most of these are not perfect either.
Try Adobe Reader X for free - this gives you the option to save the file as text; which you may then be able to paste into Excel and reconfigure.