Compare ways to turn a picture of a table into Excel

See what you actually get if you retype a table, if you copy plain text, or if you scan it into rows and columns.

Three ways to get a printed or photographed table into Excel feel similar until you look at the sheet. The difference is whether each value lands in its own cell.

Retype it

Typing is accurate when the table is short and you are careful. It is the slow option, and a skipped row is easy to miss because nothing lines the paper up with the sheet. Use it for a handful of cells, not for a page of attendance or a price list.

Copy the words and hope the columns survive

Plain text recognition gives you the words. It often gives them as lines or as one block, so “12” and “North” that sat in different columns arrive in the same cell or in the wrong order. You then split columns by hand. That can be fine for a paragraph. It is a poor fit for a grid.

Scan the grid

A table scan tries to keep the rows and columns. In Tablune you photograph the table or open a PDF, OCR reads the grid, and you save Excel. Tap a cell to fix a misread before you export. Add a row or column if the line was faint. The original photo or PDF stays on the device, which is the check against the sheet.

Tablune is an iPhone and iPad app, coming soon, with a 7-day free trial. It needs iOS 15.6 or later. It is also a file manager, so the picture and the sheet can live together. It does not claim a lower price than another OCR app. The thing to compare is whether you get cells or a paragraph.