Import from paper to Excel
I have a spreadsheet on paper that I want to scan and import into Excel. I want to know if this can be done and if it can retain it's format. I probably already know the answer but want to give this a try. If I can, it will save me many hours of work. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks.
If you have access to OCR scanning it can be done. Depending on the scanning software you may end up with a table in a Word document, but then you should be able to copy/paste from there into Excel. You will need to do quite a lot of formatting and there won't be any formulas for totals, etc., but you can always add those later.
If you don't have access to OCR scanning, office supplies retailers often provide this service.
Good luck with it!
Trish in Oz
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A problem well defined is a puzzle half solved
If you attach a sample of your workbook it will be easier to find a solution.Remember to remove/replace sensitive data before uploading the file. Look here if you need help with attachments:
http://www.excelforum.com/faq.php?fa...b3_attachments
Hi,Originally Posted by edrachel
A good OCR program should be able to pick out the data and retain the position on the page, a better OCR would columnize the data, then import that as Text to Columns, Fixed Width etc.
hth
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Si fractum non sit, noli id reficere.
Keep in mind you must have a clean preferably laser printed copy of your spreadsheet as the OCR ,(Optical Charactor Recognition) program will treat any little print boogers on the text as something it does not recognise as a charactor and will give you gibberish.
At least that's what I ran into awhile back when I tried the same thing but printer's and OCR software have advanced since then so you may not get the same results.
At work I use a program called Monarch it will take a text file and export it to excel! You can get a lite version of it on the net.
You must setup a "Model" to grab your data though.
Charles
After retiring from my employment, quite a few years ago now. and not using later versions of Excel, I was wondering if the day would come if ever on Excel you could scan in a paper copy of any sheet containing any information on it as maybe Background in Excel and then insert formulas into it, rather than building a whole new worksheet from scratch!
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