Scan into Excel

[Royce]

Is there a way to scan a document and import it into
Excel? In other words if I saw a spreadsheet in a book or
printed on a piece of paper, and I did not want to
recreate that spreadsheet by hand, could that spreadsheet
be scanned and then imported into Excel such that it could
then be used as a spreadsheet? If so, how would one do it?
Thanks.

 

[Gord Dibben]

Royce

You can scan the paper as text using a good OCR program to create a text file.

You can then open the text file in Excel and use the Text Import Wizard to
place the text data in rows and columns.

You would have to change text numerics back into real numerics and do some
formatting/manipulation.

It is not easy and requires that your OCR program be able to do a good job
recognizing characters.

I think 90% recogn1tion is considered fairly good.

Gord Dibben Excel MVP