New in Excel: Get Data from Image | Excel vs. OneNote

Excel finally has a built-in feature for extracting data/text from an image. In this video I have 2 demonstrations and compare the results to OneNote's "Copy Text From Image."

For a list of my Excel courses at Lynda/LinkedIn:


There are courses on Power Query, Good spreadsheet habits, and a weekly Excel challenge that comes out every Friday.


My book: Guerrilla Data Analysis 2nd Edition

[recalcordie]

Great video Oz!

1. Minute 1:50 loving that you also snap out that window. Very hand to do with the Pivot Table Field Pane. You're right, too many presents from Microsoft and Excel just keeps getting better and better 🔥

2. Minute 5:05 - so true at many levels. Thank you for sharing this part Oz.

3. The spider on minute 8:08 is....scary.

4. Loving the warning message at the end 12:30! watch out the snake doesn't bite you Oz!

[GrainneDuggan_Excel]

Thanks for the comparison Oz and for the warnings. We can always trust you to keep us aware of the pitfalls.

This feature should be good eventally after the Excel team releases future updates.

[arthurmiller]

Nice to know this is in the pipe. Once it goes live I'm curious to see what it does with something a little more easy to identify like a printout of an Excel report, or something like a receipt or invoice.

I think it's asking a lot of the AI to "understand" how the data is organized on the images (i.e.; the cigar survey has multiple sections of data or that the seating chart has names around a common table or to ignore the graphic behind the title and date).

[timmybone]

A cool feature that might be useful one day. I also appreciate including the cigar club, I'm about to go check them out. If you have a referral link, let me know.

[ExcelExciting]

This was the only feature available in Mac & I use to make windows user jealous 😎

[bravucod]

Can you use this feature using power query? For example have a folder with multiple pictures (same picture but with different data, monthly) and consolidated?

[ExcelUpNorth]

I’d probably ignore the warning after the 3rd or 4th time haha. Neat feature! Surely it’ll get better over time. Thanks!

[jon]

Great video, but where can I get a sweet excel jersey? That thing is amazing!

[bgezal]

This is like OCR performance from 30 years ago. In 2022 I expect printed text be 100% recognized, and that is knows if words are in columns or rows.

[scottsakamoto]

This is pretty cool that Excel is incorporating OCR (Optical .Character Recognition) into their software

I wonder how Adobe Acrobat Pro’s OCR would stack up to One Note’s OCR?

See you at CC if you’re smoking today

Thanks for the vid
Stay Smoky

[slayya]

Getting data from a picture always sounds like a bad idea but from seeing the video, the feature seems absolutely useless.
There was a perfectly fine table in the first try, so why didn't that compute (with the exception of the clip, of course)?
How does it behave with clean pictures of tables?

[DIGITAL_COOKING]

i don't totally agree with you ( even you are one of best MVP of excel for me )because personally i believe we must have the assumption that the data is presented in form of table before using this feature and we can not compare it with one note feature because it brings you only the text( no form of table)
(hope you get my point because of my poor English)