A printed page of an Excel file and want to make a usable Excel file from it. Is there a program that can recognise the typing boxes etc that will convert it to Excel format? or will I be manually typing it all in? (I changed the question so to make it a bit clearer to everyone) :-)
2007-03-21 08:11:34 · 5 answers · asked by bradsharkuk 2 in Computers & Internet ➔ Software
Putting it into Excel is the easy part - conveting the scan into text is the hard part!
You need some OCR software (Optical Character Recognition). If you Acrobat professional, it is built in. Some scanners have this software bundled in, or its a matter of googling for a free/trial version.
My only advice is that cheap software can often make mistakes eg o=0 or I=1 etc. Often they come with a dictionary but if its numbers, then you need to check it over.
2007-03-22 22:15:41 · answer #1 · answered by Marky 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
As I understand your question, you have a hard copy, originally prepared in Excel, that you scanned. After you scanned it, it will depend on the format of the final product. Scansoft makes a product that when you scan a document it will convert it to any Office file. That's what I use. But it is not free -- and it ain't cheap either. They have a trial version, though. See http://www.nuance.com/omnipage/professional/.
2007-03-21 08:43:21 · answer #2 · answered by carl j 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
You need an OCR (optical character recognition) program to interpret your scan into a Word doc (from there it can be exported to Excel).
Some sort of OCR software usually comes with a scanner.
If the Excel spreadsheet has lots of formatting, it may be very difficult to convert the scan into a readable document.
It's an odd way to do things, though.
There's probably a better way.
Good luck anyway. :)
2007-03-23 00:53:32 · answer #3 · answered by J 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I think I understand. You can copy and paste it into word and it will be a table, and then you can change it from table to text, or what ever you want.
I have also imported text files from other document into excel and made a worksheet. go to data on the menu list and go down to get external data. i hope this helps. there is ways.
2007-03-21 08:16:53 · answer #4 · answered by NANCY J 5 · 0⤊ 1⤋
you can cut and paste into excel and then parse the text into columns.
on mine, "Data" toolbar, down at "Text to columns"
sometimes i have been able to paste and have it go into columns
2007-03-21 08:24:02 · answer #5 · answered by lynn 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋