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Microsoft Excel Can Now Turn Pictures of Tables Into Actual, Editable Tables (thurrott.com)
Microsoft has rolled out a new feature to Excel's Android app that makes it easy to capture data. From a report: Excel now lets you take pictures of a document/paper in real life, crop the picture, and turn that into an actual, editable data on Excel. After capturing the data, you can edit the data to make sure Excel's image recognition is 100% accurate, and make any changes if some of the scanned data were incorrect. The company says it will roll out this feature to Excel for iOS app soon.
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I totally read that as edible tables.
Good is never enough, when you dream of being great!
https://xkcd.com/2116/
https://xkcd.com/2116/
captcha : pastor
Fed it all of these: https://unsplash.com/search/photos/table
Bunch of garbage - didn't convert a single one into anything that made sense at all.
... why did it take this long before Microsoft added this feature to their document processing suite? Really. Is this such a minor feature that they only got around to it now? Or did no one even think of this until recently?
You don't know how many times that I received a screen shot of some text in a Word document. But I've gotten the same thing a number of times in an Excel spreadsheet as well. They should put this in desktop Excel.
Thank god I'm not alone on that!
Thought "Wait, why is Excel making edible tables....and from pictures? WHAT?"
Damn English and its stupid homynyms....
Can the PC version excel do this with PDF files? That should be a lot easier.
Why would I want to edit a table in Excel when I have 3D modeling programs?
Table carpenters are going to be pissed.
Because you're as dumb as I am and read this as taking pictures of physical tables that people eat lunch on.
I was confused for at least 15 seconds.
Posting anonymously out of embarassment.
Yeah, the grammer police might object but "data were captured" just sounds wrong.
Yes, edible table put out by Iodine Bucks the same guy that makes the pepperoni plates.
Why, because traditional tables are stupid!
I take that it employs some form of OCR to turn a graphics file into text that's imported into Excel. Let us know when it also captures any formulas used to create the original table. :^)
Definitely not alone. I was all excited to mail my boss edible excel reports.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
So you can convert an image of numbers into data in a spreadsheet? It's a trivial improvement on something we have been able to do for decades.
Wake me up when the software can discover the relationship between the columns in the table, and insert the appropriate cell-references and math operations.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I totally read that as edible tables.
Me too. Then I thought about edible underwear. I'm sick.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
My eyes read the title too quickly and I thought...Microsoft is using excel to turn pictures into edible tables!?!?! I mean what is an edible table? Read the description and the first time through my brain still read edible, but context led me to believe it was playing tricks on me lol.
Me too. Then I thought about edible underwear. I'm sick.
You shouldn't eat them off "working women" if you don't want to get sick.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
... you know, the one where they develop an app that takes a picture of an equation and then the app solves the equation?
Definitely not alone. I was all excited to mail my boss edible excel reports.
I can't imagine Microsoft would make very tasty tables even if they could make edible tables. They'd probably be old fashioned from expired ingredients- and you'd have to eat them with three fingers.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
How about adding a spreadsheet diff tool that isn't a useless piece of shit designed without usability in mind?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Or your Mom, if they were oedipal tables.
Me too. Then I thought about edible underwear. I'm sick.
You shouldn't eat them off "working women" if you don't want to get sick.
I'm speechless.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I initially read it as turning pictures of tablets into actual, editable tablets. It made absolutely no sense to me until I came back a few hours later and re-read the headline.
Its weird many of the comments here are trivializing this. I will admit, yah! it seems pretty fucking obvious to add this feature. However, what open source software does this? I am genuinely interested. Does Libre Office? I would love to see this in a text reader programs because I haven't seen that feature in any of the ones I've used like Voice Dream Reader or Capti.
Sweet. All you can eat Instagram buffet!
Will it interpret units and wreck the data as usual?
The whole point of a spreadsheet is to ensure accurate data. If there is just some OCR being done on a lossy image how much faith are you willing to put in the results? The story says you can manually inspect the table to ensure accuracy but is that much better then hand entering data?
you don't eat crackers in the bed of your future--or else you'll get all scratchy
Given that Excel's support for .csv files has always been shoddy, outputting an image and OCR'ing it in might actually be an improvement?
Kudos, very cool & useful feature! But it needs one more step: After Excel loads a screenshot into an Excel table, let it throw up the original image and the new table image together, overlapping, in the same window, with the differences highlighted. We've been able to do that for decades now with the OpenSource ImageMagick software, though without GUI-based scaling to get things to match up. Still, better than printing it out and holding 2 sheets of paper up to a light. Or loading it into GIMP and switching transparency on & off.
If they made the best steak on earth, you would be here talking about your open source Sizzler sirloin being better in every way possible. The meat strings even floss your fucking teeth
I wait for the next version, hoping it supports edible pictures of chairs as well.
After capturing the data, you can edit the data to make sure Excel's image recognition is 100% accurate
Obviously the point is that the image recognition is NOT 100% accurate, otherwise you wouldn't need to edit the data. Otherwise my 2002 Volvo is a self-driving car, notwithstanding the minor course corrections I need to constantly make to make sure its self-driving capability is 100% accurate.