Guides
How to Convert a Table Screenshot to Excel
Recognize the text in a screenshot or photo, check every cell against the original and download a real Excel workbook.
Start with an image OCR can read
Sharp, upright images with printed text give the best results, and screenshots are usually cleaner than camera photos. When photographing a page, shoot it straight on with even light and no glare. Simple grids work best; merged cells, handwriting and curved pages often need manual correction.
Convert in five steps
- Open Image to Excel. Select Choose images, drop files, paste a screenshot, or use Take a photo on a phone. JPG, PNG and WebP are supported.
- Under Content layout, choose Table → cells & columns for tables or Document text → one line per row for plain text. Set Text language to English, or English + Simplified Chinese.
- With several images, check Image order: rows are merged in that order. Rotate sideways photos first, then select Recognize images. The recognition engine downloads on first use (about 8–11 MB).
- In Review your spreadsheet, compare rows with Check the original, edit any cell and uncheck rows you want to leave out, such as repeated headers. If the columns look wrong, set Number of columns and recognize again.
- Select Download Excel (.xlsx), or CSV or TSV for other apps. Open the file and compare totals and IDs with the original before you rely on it.
Excel, CSV or TSV?
Choose Excel for most uses. The workbook keeps leading zeros and long IDs as text and adds a Sources sheet that records where each row came from. CSV and TSV are plain text, and spreadsheet apps may reformat them when opened, for example by dropping leading zeros. Formula-like text is escaped in CSV and TSV so a cell is not run as a formula.
What OCR can get wrong
OCR reads printed text and estimates columns from their positions. It can miss characters, confuse similar ones such as 0 and O, or put text in the wrong cell. Overlapping rows and repeated headers are flagged, never deleted automatically. Recognizing an image again replaces its cell edits, so settle the options before you start editing.
Pro features described here require an active license. New Pro purchases are currently unavailable; check Pricing for availability.