Preserve less-than and greater-than qualifiers

A threshold is not an equality

Carry the qualifier through to the spreadsheet so the result remains usable without reopening every source cell.

Before paying for technical-document extraction, inspect how the source meaning survives in the output. ParseMill’s public material-register example gives you a synthetic PDF and downloadable evidence to compare. Bring your own document type and acceptance checks to a scope discussion; the self-service invoice plan is a separate offer.

This transcription pattern does not decide how censored or bounded observations should enter statistical analysis. That decision depends on the measurement context and intended use. Keep any later substitution or model in a derived layer with its own justification.

Use a comparator worksheet

These synthetic rows deliberately distinguish strict from inclusive comparisons. Replacing ≤ with < would lose the inclusion of the boundary. The fourth row is a scalar observation and should not inherit a comparator merely because it shares a column with qualified results.

NIST: SI notation checklist emphasizes clear relationships between numerical values, operations and units. Preserve the unit with the threshold to avoid an equally serious change in meaning.

Transcribe the qualifier deliberately

1. Inspect the source glyph at useful magnification. Distinguish less-than, less-than-or-equal and a stray scanning mark.
2. Capture the full result as text before numeric conversion. Separate the comparator only under a documented parsing rule.
3. Verify threshold notation and units independently. A decimal-comma ambiguity remains unresolved even if the comparator is clear.
4. Export and reopen the worksheet. Confirm that the qualifier survives and that the threshold column is not presented as an exact result.

Microsoft: Number.FromText converts recognized numeric text. Apply it to a verified numeric threshold, not to a string from which meaningful qualifiers have been silently stripped.

Reject convenient substitutions

A system that accepts only a scalar may tempt you to enter the threshold, half the threshold or zero. None is a faithful transcription of the qualified source statement. If downstream analysis needs such a convention, obtain and record a method appropriate to that analysis, then preserve the original qualified result beside the derived number.

A qualifier may also be explained by a report-specific legend. Retain that evidence and the applicable row range. Do not assume that every less-than result in a combined register has the same analytical significance.

Check the export’s meaning

The fixture passes when each comparator and unit remains attached to its own threshold, and the exact-value field remains unavailable for the first three rows. A reviewer should be able to reconstruct the source statement without guessing which transformation occurred.

Qualified measurement results need a document-specific fit assessment. Inspect the public material-register example, then bring strict and inclusive qualifiers from your own reports to a scope discussion. Agree the required output before any wider pilot; the self-service trial processes invoice PDFs.