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Microsoft Android IT

Microsoft Excel Can Now Turn Pictures of Tables Into Actual, Editable Tables (thurrott.com) 82

Posted by msmash 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.
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Microsoft Excel Can Now Turn Pictures of Tables Into Actual, Editable Tables More

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

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  • Obligatory xkcd (Score:5, Funny)

    by CyberSlugGump ( 609485 ) on Friday March 01, 2019 @03:13PM (#58201196)
    .NORM Normal File Format [xkcd.com]

  • I totally read that as edible tables.

    • Yes, edible table put out by Iodine Bucks the same guy that makes the pepperoni plates.

      Why, because traditional tables are stupid!

    • I totally read that as edible tables.

      Me too. Then I thought about edible underwear. I'm sick.

      • Me too. Then I thought about edible underwear. I'm sick.

        You shouldn't eat them off "working women" if you don't want to get sick.

        • Me too. Then I thought about edible underwear. I'm sick.

          You shouldn't eat them off "working women" if you don't want to get sick.

          I'm speechless.

    • I initially read it as turning pictures of tablets into actual, editable tablets. It made absolutely no sense to me until I came back a few hours later and re-read the headline.

  • Broken. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Fed it all of these: https://unsplash.com/search/photos/table

    Bunch of garbage - didn't convert a single one into anything that made sense at all.

  • ... why did it take this long before Microsoft added this feature to their document processing suite? Really. Is this such a minor feature that they only got around to it now? Or did no one even think of this until recently?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Well on a PC what would you do? try to hold paper up to your shitty webcam blocking the screen so you can't see what it is capturing or focusing on?
    • Easy answer...It is HARD. OCR [wikipedia.org] 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.

      • Re:Someone has to ask... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by chispito ( 1870390 ) on Friday March 01, 2019 @04:02PM (#58201550)

        Easy answer...It is HARD. OCR [wikipedia.org] 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.

      • Easy answer...It is HARD. OCR [wikipedia.org] has been around for years but even today it is hit or miss except for the most sophisticated systems.

        Yes, generalized OCR is hard. But the problem gets much easier if you limit the "alphabet" of characters you're trying to recognize. Ten digits plus comma, space and perhaps currency symbols is a much smaller alphabet than full unicode, or even just ASCII.

      • It's not that hard. I used Fine Reader to OCR stuff more than a decade ago and it worked well enough on printed text to be very useful. Complex layout with tables, multiple columns of text and so on could be a challenge, but knowing it's supposed to be an Excel table, combined with a decade of neural net development, it should've been relatively trivial.

      • even today it is hit or miss except for the most sophisticated systems.

        I don't know, Google translate does a really, really good job figuring out what I'm trying to write, sometimes even when I write the wrong character.

  • Why mobile only? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by aaron44126 ( 2631375 ) on Friday March 01, 2019 @03:25PM (#58201300) Homepage
    You don't know how many times that I received a screen shot of some text in a Word document. But I've gotten the same thing a number of times in an Excel spreadsheet as well. They should put this in desktop Excel.

  • PDFs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by doconnor ( 134648 ) on Friday March 01, 2019 @03:35PM (#58201380) Homepage

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

    • I'm not aware of the PC version having this feature sadly

      That said, if you do this with any regularity, ABBYY FineReader (especially version 8 which is tough to find) works marvelously - probably better than any add-on feature in excel

      I've had to spend many hours doing this on large quantities of bank/brokerage statements in the context of consulting engagements
  • Why would I want to edit a table in Excel when I have 3D modeling programs?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by novakyu ( 636495 )

      Because Excel will give you a 2D representation to work with from the cropped picture; to use 3D modeling program, you need to take photos of the table from multiple perspectives, in order to build a 3D model.

    • Aren't you so special. Ever think not everyone has that capability and this could help them? Naaa, your like my x wife. You only think about your self

  • Big fricking deal (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Friday March 01, 2019 @03:57PM (#58201518) Journal

    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.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by doom ( 14564 )

      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.

      Thinking in terms of "discovering the relationship" is old-fashioned thinking, today's advanced software can automatically try every possible relationship and use a crowd-sourced technique to determine the most popular of all possible underlying data models.

      And column summation errors can now be introduced automatically to eliminate any legal respons

    • Haha. Totally hilarious. But that would be an awesome feature. Just leaving this here: https://coincircle.com/l/fLS02... [coincircle.com]

  • Taken from a Big Bang Theory episode? (Score:3)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Friday March 01, 2019 @04:14PM (#58201630)
    ... you know, the one where they develop an app that takes a picture of an equation and then the app solves the equation?
    • I'm pretty sure that's been done, I remember trying some app a few years ago that did that. I think it was something from Google back around the cardboard VR days. It wasn't perfect and no clue how advanced math it could do, but proof of concept exists somewhere.

  • Dumnnnn (Score:3)

    by Impy the Impiuos Imp ( 442658 ) on Friday March 01, 2019 @04:16PM (#58201640) Journal

    How about adding a spreadsheet diff tool that isn't a useless piece of shit designed without usability in mind?

  • Will it interpret units and wreck the data as usual [onmsft.com]?
  • The whole point of a spreadsheet is to ensure accurate data. If there is just some OCR being done on a lossy image how much faith are you willing to put in the results? The story says you can manually inspect the table to ensure accuracy but is that much better then hand entering data?
    • Isn't typing a 100x10 grid of numbers harder than checking if they are the same? The tool aims at helping you not eliminating the human altogether (kinda the driver assists in self-driving cars, not fully autonomous). Also the lesser work can be done by a less skilled person (say an intern)
      • Once I needed the lyrics of a song (in lang foo). Internet search I could find only a jpeg image (likely a scan from a physical song book). I need to edit it. I found a online OCR which did a pretty good job, reducing my work by say 90% or more. Yes there were some errors but the time/effort I saved is significant. So OCR has its place and with AI/ML abilities increasing, they get better with time.
      • What happens when you've got 1000 distinct numbers and a 6 gets OCR'd into an 8 and it's in the ten-thousands column. May as well just type them in if you care about the data. If you don't care and just want to look like you've done the work then this is a great solution.

  • After capturing the data, you can edit the data to make sure Excel's image recognition is 100% accurate

    Obviously the point is that the image recognition is NOT 100% accurate, otherwise you wouldn't need to edit the data. Otherwise my 2002 Volvo is a self-driving car, notwithstanding the minor course corrections I need to constantly make to make sure its self-driving capability is 100% accurate.

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