Excel Can Now Turn Pictures of Tables Into Actual, Editable Tables

Microsoft is introducing a really useful feature for Excel on mobile devices. The company is rolling out a new update to the Excel app for Android that makes it really easy to capture data.

If you ever had to manually enter data from a paper in real life into your spreadsheets, you are going to love this. 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.

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

https://twitter.com/OfficeNews/status/1101234527651987458

The feature seems really useful, and it’s just one of the ways Microsoft has been pushing Office apps recently. The company’s continued focus on AI has really helped apps like Excel get better and better when it could just continue to be that one boring spreadsheet app. Microsoft can easily bring similar features powered by image recognition and AI to other Office apps as well, so this is probably just the beginning.

The company plans to bring the feature to iOS in the near future.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Conversation 8 comments

  • Chris_Kez

    Premium Member
    01 March, 2019 - 1:55 pm

    <p>The number of times I could have used this as a grad student… <em>le sigh</em></p>

  • starkover

    01 March, 2019 - 2:52 pm

    <p>Just tried it on my Note 9 on remarkably poor original. (Multi copied company phone list) It worked surprisingly well.</p>

  • IanYates82

    Premium Member
    01 March, 2019 - 3:33 pm

    <p>There was an xkcd comic earlier this week that's rendered moot by this. </p><p><br></p><p>Surprised it's come to Android first rather than iOS. Usually the other way around </p>

  • sdboucher

    Premium Member
    01 March, 2019 - 8:13 pm

    <p>I can't wait to try it on ios!</p>

  • chrisrs

    03 March, 2019 - 12:28 am

    <p>Looks cool.</p><p><br></p><p>Some curious observations:</p><p class="ql-indent-1">This seems to be based on an older version of Office Lens. The crop tool does not have the targeting detail that avoids covering the curser with your finger.</p><p class="ql-indent-1"><br></p><p class="ql-indent-1">It is curious that Office Lens saves to every thing but Excel. (Word, One Note, Power Point, PDF, and gallery)</p><p class="ql-indent-1"><br></p><p class="ql-indent-1">Word does not have an equivalent direct method, instead relying on Office Lens, then cut and paste. (Smokestacks!)</p><p class="ql-indent-1"><br></p><p class="ql-indent-1">Flash fires erratically</p><p class="ql-indent-1">It would be nice if the desktop version of Office Lens had this capability.</p><p><br></p><p><img src="">As far as using it, I had mixed results.</p><p><img src="">Office Lens does a much better job creating a Word Table than the Excel import of the same image.</p><p>If I knew how to post screen shots, I would.</p><p><br></p>

  • truerock2

    04 March, 2019 - 8:12 pm

    <p>I wish Microsoft Word could do this.</p>

  • dontbe evil

    05 March, 2019 - 6:04 am

    <p>love it … and people still use gsuite? LOL</p>

  • newgov

    18 March, 2019 - 6:38 am

    <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">that will be a very useful feature of Microsoft excel thanks for the</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </span><a href="https://www.newgovjob.online/&quot; target="_blank" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">information</a><a href="https://www.newgovjob.online/&quot; target="_blank" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> .</a></p>

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC