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Microsoft Excel Can Now Turn Pictures of Tables Into Actual, Editable Tables (thurrott.com)

Posted by msmash on from the interesting-features dept.

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.

4 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Obligatory xkcd by CyberSlugGump · · Score: 5, Funny

    .NORM Normal File Format

  2. PDFs by doconnor · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Can the PC version excel do this with PDF files? That should be a lot easier.

  3. Big fricking deal by ClickOnThis · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  4. Re:Someone has to ask... by chispito · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Easy answer...It is HARD. OCR has been around for years but even today it is hit or miss except for the most sophisticated systems. I'm curious how well it translates on a mobile device. I've used OCR on PDF and Word documents that were just images and even when the text was perfectly legible it had a hard time getting the letters right and the formatting was always all over the place.

    Pretty sure the OCR will not be done on your device, but elsewhere.

    --
    The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!