Afterwards well i'm going to use different types of images we're going to test it out together and let's see what we get as the final outcome.
Our first test case is a screenshot so i often get screenshots of people's spreadsheets looking for solutions they can't always share the file itself because of sensitive data but for me.
It's easier to figure out a solution when i can actually use the data and i'm not a fan of recreating the screenshot by hand you may remember there is a way to convert an image to excel and i.
Covered it in this video but for that you had to use the app on your smartphone now we get that feature directly in windows for excel desktop it's currently in beta and it should.
Properly let's jump in a student sent me their function that's not working and they're wondering why it's not working i'd like to bring this to excel especially the data side of.
Things so i don't necessarily need the function here it would be nice if it comes with but it's important for me to get the data so i can try out my own version of the formula here.
Where do we go to when we want to use this feature we go currently to the data tab so it's sitting together with the get and transform data options it's actually.
Called from pictures if i expand my ribbon you can see that here that's the option that we need if you're using a mac it's sitting in the insert tab.
So we're gonna go picture from file that's the picture i want we're gonna click on insert now we get this pop-up on the side we see a preview of the image.
Posts Related:
And i can make it bigger or smaller if i
Zoom in and out now if i scroll down that's how the data is going to look so i can either just go ahead and insert the data right now or i.Can review this so let's just click on review and see what we get four items require a review one is this formula it seems like it's missing parts but i.
Don't really care about the formula so i'm just going to go ahead and accept this then it's this part here it doesn't know what to do with that oh that's the rest.
Of the formula let's just go ahead and accept this is fine let's accept it and it's picking something up here i can't see anything i'm just going to go ahead.
And accept and now this option is grayed out here notice on this row i'm actually getting the column headers if i zoom out we see that l and m and n so some of these column headers are being picked.
Out here but it's fine it looks good let's just go ahead and insert the data and it tells me that you are responsible for validating the accuracy of the data so you can't tell your boss it was excel.
That did it you need to check it out yourself okay so this is what i get the formula is all messed up but i don't really care about these so i'm just gonna delete.
That was where the formula was actually sitting i don't need this either but i need this and this looks pretty good except that the columns are a bit messed up.
Now in the screenshot we just had the grid lines activated so probably if we have good borders around the data set it would have been easier to recognize it but it doesn't really matter because.
It's easy in this case to just clean
This up it's definitely better than having to type this out from scratch and if we cross check these numbers with our screenshot we're going to see that the.Numbers were picked up correctly and they're actually seen as numbers so if i use autosum here using the shortcut key alt equals and i press enter i get the sum of these values okay so even though.
It wasn't perfect it did save me a lot of time here another practical use case i can see for this is grabbing data images from websites now why would you need this.
We'll take a look at this example here we have the fortune global 500 list for 2021. now let's say i'm interested in this data set here well i want to try and bring this to excel so i'm going to.
Copy this go to excel and paste this in and that's the way it comes in now you might say well what about power query.
Well with power query it's not going to work either because this data set here is using javascript it's not using html so power query can't pick it up so let's grab a screenshot of this i'm going to.
Use the shortcut key ctrl shift s let's capture only this area and copy this to the clipboard now let's go back to excel this time we're going.
To go from clipboard and it's picking up our image from the clipboard we can see it here we can zoom in a bit and then just move around everything looks pretty good we have the ability to.
Review this if we want to see how many different things it picked up so that's fine we can change these if we want this looks good looks good as well and that's fine.
This is changing rank there was no change we can put nothing if we want we can put a zero or actually i can just put that dash in there as well and click on accept and now let's insert.
The data you can also just go ahead and insert the data without reviewing it you don't have to go through all of the steps let's insert it right here and take a.
Look at this it looks pretty neat here we even get the data formatted properly so this has the currency format this has the percentage format.
And so on and all our detail looks identical to what we had in the screenshots i'm just pasting the screenshot down here we can see the numbers are matching.
Okay so it did a great job on the previous example now let's take a look at something more difficult this time i have a photo of a newspaper and it's not a great photo so let me just show it to.
You here that's what we want to import so notice that the decimals are difficult to pick up in general it's just difficult to read this is it going to work let's try.
It out data from picture from file it's this one right here click on insert i hope it takes its time to analyze this but it doesn't really and i can already see there are problems.
Here so i'm not even going to bother to review this in this view in this tool let's just insert the data and review it on the grid 18 items still require review yeah i think it's may even be.
More than that so let's insert anyway and take a look at this notice the date was picked up properly that's great this one is fine not so fine and here it looks like we're.
Missing some minor details i'm just being sarcastic here it looks like we're missing the decimal okay let's double check with our image it's easier if i insert this.
As a picture just put it to the side here and start comparing and this one looks good this one the digits are fine the decimal is gone.
And here as well instead of the decimal we're getting a space so we can switch that this as well this one does require us to go line by line and cross check if everything is.
Okay i can't really trust this i would have to compare each number with the image here okay so overall for this case with this type of image it didn't do such a great job as you can see the.
Results are mixed sometimes you don't need to do much at all and sometimes you have to put in a lot of effort but definitely less than if you had to type everything manually so i expect.
That with time and with further development of this technology behind this the accuracy is going to improve and the tool isn't perfect but it's already a time saver what do you think.
Is it going to be useful to you perhaps to digitalize old tax returns that only existed in hard copy or to quickly grab data from a website that doesn't want to cooperate with power query let me know.
In the comments below and don't forget to give this video a thumbs up and do consider subscribing if you aren't already and i'm gonna see you in the next video.