Retyping a table is slow and it’s easy to slip a digit. Image to Excel reads the table from a picture and gives you an editable grid of rows and columns, ready to paste into a spreadsheet or download as a file.
Tables worth converting
- Tables in PDFs and reports that won’t copy cleanly and come out as one jumbled column when you try
- Dashboards and web pages that show data but don’t offer an export
- Price lists, rate cards, timetables and schedules, printed or on screen
- Sports standings, results and league tables
- Printed tables in books, handouts and manuals, photographed with your phone
- Account statements and transaction lists you need in a spreadsheet, without sending them to a website
How Table mode finds rows and columns
Table mode lines words up into rows and finds columns from the empty space that runs down between them. That means a table doesn’t need borders or grid lines to be read correctly; clean alignment matters much more than lines.
When you add an image, Image to Text App often recognizes a table on its own and shows a label such as “Looks like a table”. On this page Table mode is already selected. If what you added turns out to be ordinary text, switch modes without adding the image again.
Preparing the image
- Crop to the table. Titles, notes and footnotes above or below a table can confuse the column layout. Keep the header row, and leave out the rest.
- Straighten photos of printed tables. Columns need to run straight down the page. For a table photographed at an angle, use four-corner straightening so the rows run level and the columns run straight. Auto improve fixes a slight tilt by itself.
- Split very large tables. If a table is wide or long and the text is tiny, take two or three screenshots of sections at a readable size, convert each one, and stack them in your spreadsheet.
Tables that need extra care
Merged cells. A heading that spans several columns, or a label that covers several rows, comes through in a single cell, often the column where it starts. After pasting, merge the cells again in Excel or Sheets if you need the original layout.
Borderless tables with narrow gaps. When two columns sit very close together, they can be read as one. Add a column in the grid and move the values across, or split them in your spreadsheet afterwards.
Text that wraps inside a cell. A long description on two lines can look like two rows. Image to Text App tries to join wrapped text back into its row. If a row still looks split, move the text up and delete the extra row.
Invoices and receipts. If your image is an invoice rather than a plain table, Receipt or invoice mode is usually the better choice. It reads the business name, dates and totals as well as the line items. See invoice OCR.
Check the numbers before you rely on them
Values the engine was unsure about are underlined. In tables, the usual suspects are 0 and O, 1 and l, 5 and S, and 8 and B, along with decimal points and commas, which are tiny and easy to lose in a blurry image. Minus signs, and negative numbers written in brackets, are worth a second look too.
A quick check after pasting: add up a column in your spreadsheet and compare it with the total row in the original. If they match, the column is very likely right.
XLSX, CSV, or copy and paste
- Copy and paste is fastest when you’re adding the table to a sheet you already have open.
- Excel (.xlsx) is the default here, a file that opens directly in Excel.
- CSV is a plain format that almost anything can import, including Google Sheets and databases.
One thing to know about CSV: when Excel opens a CSV file by double-clicking, it guesses each column’s type. It drops leading zeros from things like ZIP codes and account numbers and can turn some values into dates. Use Excel’s From Text/CSV import to set those columns as text, or use the XLSX download instead.
The same table can also be downloaded as JSON for use in code; see image to JSON. For more depth on difficult tables, read how to extract tables from images.