Convert an image of a table to Excel

Drop a photo, screenshot or scan of a table and download it as an .xlsx file: one row per row, the original column headers, and amounts as numbers you can sum. Phone photos taken at an angle, screenshots of dashboards and handwritten sheets all work.

Three real tests

We made three pictures of tables the way people actually have them: a printed stock sheet photographed with a phone, a screenshot of a sales dashboard, and a handwritten timesheet. Each went through this page with "Everything" selected, and we downloaded the Excel file it produced. Every cell was then compared with the table we drew. Nothing below was edited; the pictures and the .xlsx files are downloadable at the end of this section.

1. A phone photo of a printed sheet

Photo of a printed stock count sheet lying at an angle on a brown desk, with ten rows of SKU, item, quantity, unit price and total — Input: angled, slightly blurred, shadow across the page.

ExtractFox result table with the ten stock rows and the title Stock count — Aisle 4 — What this page showed: 50 of 50 cells right.

In the Excel file, Qty, Unit price and Total are number cells ($6.49 became 6.49), so =SUM(E2:E11) gives 994.84, the total printed on the sheet. The "Total stock value" line stayed out of the rows, because it's a summary, not an item.

2. A screenshot of a dashboard

Screenshot of a web analytics dashboard with a Sales by region table: orders, revenue, refunds in parentheses, net and percentage change — Input: thousands separators, refunds in parentheses, coloured percentages.

ExtractFox result table with six regions, refunds as negative numbers and change as numbers — 36 of 36 cells right.

$96,420.50 came back as 96420.5 and ($2,310.00) as -2310, so the refunds column sums to a negative number the way an accountant expects. The navigation bar and the subtitle were left out.

3. A handwritten timesheet

Handwritten weekly timesheet on ruled paper with day, start, end, break and hours columns — Input: handwriting on ruled paper, page slightly rotated.

ExtractFox result table with five days of start, end, break and hours — 25 of 25 cells right.

Times stay as written (8:30, 17:00) and Hours is a number column, so the week adds up to 37.5 in Excel.

Results side by side

Cells right = the value in the right row and column, compared with the table we drew. Tesseract returns lines of text with no columns, so for it we counted how many of the true values appear anywhere in its output, which flatters it.

Picture	Cells	ExtractFox: cells right	Number cells in the .xlsx	Seconds	Tesseract: values found in its text
Phone photo	50	50	30 (Qty, Unit price, Total)	6.2	46
Dashboard screenshot	36	36	30 (every numeric column)	4.3	29
Handwritten timesheet	25	25	5 (Hours)	4.3	20

Three pictures is a demonstration, not a benchmark, and all three were legible. Where it breaks: digits smaller than about 9 pixels high, a column cut off at the edge of the picture, and glare sitting on a number. In those cases the cell comes back empty rather than guessed, so look for blanks before you rely on a total.

Why plain OCR isn't enough for a table

Tesseract read most of the characters on the clean pictures. What it returns is lines of text: "HW-1187 Wall plugs 8 mm (100) 30 $3.95 $118.50". To get that into Excel you still have to split every line into columns, and spaces inside item names make that guesswork. On the phone photo it turned the first total into "eee" and the header line into "ow od Qty"; on the timesheet a break of 0:45 became "O:-4S". Amounts keep their $ signs and commas, so Excel stores them as text until you clean them.

Timesheet — week of Sep 28

pay Start end Break Hours

Mow 8:30 17:00 0:30 g

Tue 9:00 17:30 O:-4S FFs

Tesseract on the handwritten timesheet, first lines.

Excel's own Data from Picture

Excel can do this too: Data > From Picture takes a picture file or a screenshot from the clipboard. It needs a Microsoft 365 subscription, Microsoft recommends a head-on, cropped picture of only the table, and you then review the cells it flags before inserting them. If you already pay for Microsoft 365 and your pictures are clean screenshots, it's a good option. This page needs no Office account, takes angled photos and pictures with more than one table, and can return only the rows or columns you ask for.

Getting a clean result

Fill the frame with the table. You don't need to crop the desk or the browser around it, but small text is where digits go wrong.
One photo per page of a long table; upload them together on a paid plan and they come back as one sheet with a source_file column.
To narrow it down, type what you want in the box above the button: "only rows where Qty is under 10", "just SKU and Total".
Times and codes like 8:30 or HW-1042 stay as text on purpose, so Excel doesn't turn them into dates or drop leading zeros.

Sources

Tesseract 5.5.3 run as tesseract image.png - --psm 6, October 7, 2026
Microsoft Support, "Insert data from picture" (support.microsoft.com), checked October 7, 2026
ExtractFox runs on the same pictures, October 7, 2026; script in the repo at scripts/samples/image-to-excel.mjs, method on how we test

Frequently asked questions

How do I convert a picture of a table to Excel?+

Upload the picture on this page, keep "Everything" selected and click Extract. Check the table it shows, then click Excel to download an .xlsx file.

Does it work with photos taken at an angle or in poor light?+

Yes, as long as a person could read the numbers in the photo. Blur, glare across a digit and text cut off at the edge are where mistakes happen; unreadable cells come back empty rather than guessed.

Can it read handwritten tables?+

Yes, neat handwriting in a ruled grid works well. Very loose cursive is where it misreads letters, so check names; digits are usually more reliable than words.

Will the numbers work in formulas?+

Yes. Amounts are written as numeric cells, so SUM, AVERAGE and pivot tables work as soon as the file opens. Currency symbols and thousands separators are removed and a value in parentheses becomes negative.

How is this different from Excel's own Data from Picture?+

Excel's Data from Picture needs a Microsoft 365 subscription and works best with a head-on, cropped picture; you then review flagged cells one by one. This page needs no Office account, reads angled photos and pictures with more than one table, and lets you ask for only the rows or columns you need.

Is my image stored?+

No. The picture is processed and discarded; it isn't kept on our servers or used to train models.