The myOnlineTraininghub blog recently had a post entitled
Import Data from a Picture to Excel
which sounded promising, since I often need to extract data from Autocad files saved to a pdf.
From the link, it seems that if I had a Mac with Excel365 then I could do that, but:
- The app is not available for Windows
- The versions for iPhone and Android work by switching to camera mode when you select the “import data” icon, so that you can take a picture of printed images.
First results from the Android version were disappointing. This table from Roark’s Formulas for Stress and Strain:
was converted into this data:
No doubt more care with taking the original photo would help, but the ability to work with existing image files (including pdf) or screen shots, preferably from a Windows computer, would make the whole process a lot easier and more reliable.
I’ll keep an eye on new developments, but at the moment it seems more trouble than it is worth.
I often use Bluebeam PDF software to pull picture tables into Excel by using Bluebeam to convert a picture or document to a PDF, then (within Bluebeam) go to File>Export>Excel Workbook>Page Region. It works great.
Sometimes the software does not realize where columns or rows are supposed to be separated, and I quick-fix that by drawing where I want Excel cell divisions in Bluebeam using the Line or Rectangle tools, flatten the PDF, then export to Excel
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