I have a print out here with data that I would like to get into Microsoft Excel,
but I definitely don't want to have to manually type that in.
Luckily, I can take a picture on either my PC or on my phone, and I can convert that into data,
and it works surprisingly well.
Let's check out how to do this.
Here on my PC, I have a somewhat grainy looking image that I would like to bring into Excel.
To bring this image into Excel, up on the top tabs, let's click on the one titled data.
Over on the left-hand side, let's select the from picture icon and
here we see the option for picture from file. Let's click on that.
You can now navigate to where you have the picture on your PC.
I’ll select this image and over on the right-hand side now,
it looks like it's analyzing my image and it's also preparing my data.
I bet it's going to do this a lot faster than I could.
It's now successfully finished extracting my data,
but I notice that a few of these items down below are red. This is where Excel wants me to
review the different items that it extracted, or it has low confidence. When I click on it,
it'll update the area of the image and here I can make modifications to the text.
It looks like it got a lowercase c instead of an upper case.
I’ll type in that change and then click on accept.
Here I could go through one by one and review all these different items.
Now one thing that's really neat is it'll also highlight that area on the image,
and I can go through and accept all these different items.
Now all of them look good except for this one.
It looks like it included an extra number by mistake. Here I'll delete that and add a comma,
otherwise that looks good, and all the rest of these look good as well.
I'll click on accept. Now that I've reviewed all this data, I can click on insert right here.
I'll insert the data and check that out. From that grainy picture,
I now have data that I can work with directly in Excel.
That worked really well.
Let's now try taking a screenshot and converting that into data.
Here I am in my browser window, and I have a table of data that I would like to bring into Excel,
but unfortunately, I can't just copy the data. That's because this is an image file.
Luckily with Excel, we can convert an image into data.
Here I'll press Windows + Shift + S. That opens up the Snipping Tool and I can now take a screenshot.
I’ll select just this table.
If you want to learn about all of the different ways that you could take a screenshot on Windows,
click on the link up above.
Back in Excel, let's now run through those same steps again.
Up on the top tabs, let's click on data.
Over on the left-hand side, let's click on the front picture icon,
except this time, let's select picture from clipboard.
When we took that screenshot, it placed it on the clipboard.
Over here, we could see that it's now finished extracting all of the data,
and there's nothing to review. When you take a screenshot,
it's a perfect digital copy, so it makes it a lot easier for Excel to evaluate.
I'll click on insert data, insert data once again, and check that out.
I now have all of the data directly in Excel and I can now edit it.
When you do this, you'll want to make sure that you
crop down just to your table that contains the data.
If you include anything else, you'll just end up confusing Excel,
and usually it's the other way around where excel just confuses me.
You can also convert an image into data using your phone.
Simply download the Office app.
You can get it right up above and that works on both iPhone and on Android.
Once you finish installing the app, in the bottom right-hand corner, let's tap on actions.
On the next screen, you have a number of different actions that you can take.
Let's tap on the one that says image to table,
and here I can now take a picture of whatever I want to bring into Microsoft Excel.
I'll take a photo here.
Next, I can select just the area of the photo that I would like to convert into Excel.
Here I'll adjust it just to bring this table in.
This is something nice about mobile that you cannot currently do on desktop.
Once you're all done, tap on confirm.
It's now extracting all of the data. Once it's all done,
you can go through, and you can review that it brought it all in properly.
If I notice any mistakes, I could tap in and then I can make edits.
Once I'm all done, in the bottom right-hand corner, I could just copy the data.
Maybe I just want to paste it directly into an e-mail message. I could do that.
In the bottom left-hand corner, I also have the option to just bring it directly into Excel.
When I tap on that, here I see all of my data in Excel.
All right, well, that's pretty cool tech.
In all of my testing, I noticed that sometimes it didn't quite work how you wanted it to.
You really have to make sure that the picture that you take has very good image quality.
You need to make sure that you have even lighting, that everything is aligned properly.
If not, you will run into some errors, but I would bet that over time the technology will
get better and better where you don't have to worry about those things quite as much.
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