Stop typing and import data into Excel and Word with only your phone camera

Say goodbye to the cumbersome entry! Just use your phone camera to easily import data into Excel and Word!

For non-professionals, spreadsheets can be daunting. Countless options, complex formulas and formatting are all very troublesome.

Even data import can be a complicated process. But Microsoft Excel's mobile app allows you to take photos of tables and paste information directly into your spreadsheet. This is not a simple picture paste, the application can read, digitize and paste the actual data into the corresponding cells.

The same function is also available in Microsoft Word applications, say goodbye to manually enter paper documents from now on!

Use mobile phone camera to import data into Excel table

It is very easy to import data into an Excel spreadsheet using a mobile phone camera. First, download the Excel app (both available for free on both iOS and Android), register or log in, and then click the plus sign in the upper right corner of the screen to create a new document. There you can choose one of the free templates for the blank spreadsheet or platform.

Tap the cell where you want to enter data, and then click the

menu button at the top of the screen (looks like an A with a pen). In the menu that pops up, click Homepage, and then select from the drop-down menu to insert . There, click to import data from pictures and allow Excel to use your device's camera.

Now point your camera to the form you want to scan—can be your bank statement, guest list, or almost any paper with information arranged by row and column. The data does not have to be in a visible grid. As long as there are rows and columns, it works fine, but we found that scanning and printing text works best. You can also try to point your camera at a spreadsheet on the screen, but there may be a moiré effect (the weird lines that appear when taking photos of your computer screen), distorting the content and making it unrecognizable to the app. Don't try to scan handwritten text – no matter how clear your handwriting is, Excel cannot read it.

Put the document on a flat surface and aim the camera directly at it (your phone should be as parallel to the surface as possible) – Pro tip: If you have a newer smartphone, you can take advantage of the built-in camera Leveling to help you place your camera correctly. When you are ready, click the shutter button and use the crop box that appears on the screen to outline the information you want to add to the spreadsheet. When finished, click

to continue .

Excel will extract data from the table you took, but before pasting it into the document, it will ask you to check the preview to make sure everything is correct. The platform will mark the content that may be wrong in red; to view it, click on the entry that may be in question and select

Edit . Finally, click at the bottom of the screen to open .

You can do this multiple times in a single Excel file, and once the data enters the spreadsheet, you can use the program's powerful analysis capabilities to process it.

Use your phone camera to import text into a Word document

You wouldn't think Microsoft would develop a great tool and just make it work for one of its Office programs, right? Excel is not the only program with photo-based text input—similar tools are available in the mobile Word app.

To use it, download the app (free download for both iOS and Android). If you have registered or logged into the Excel application, Word will recognize you and you can later skip this step using other Office mobile applications. Use the plus sign in the upper right corner of the screen to open a new document and click the menu button. Click Homepage, select from the drop-down menu to insert , and finally click Scan the document.

Word will open a tool similar to Excel, where you can select one or more images from your photo gallery, or take a new one. No matter what you do, you can use the cropping tool on the next screen to select the specific block of text to import. When finished, click to confirm .

Word apps are slightly more sensitive than Excel when it comes to importing text from real-world documents and also consider formatting. This can be a little annoying if you are only interested in plain text; if you are scanning for large content (such as news headlines), it can break the proportion of the page.

Nevertheless, if you need an editable copy of important documents, both tools can save you a lot of typing time. The Office 365 app also runs in the cloud, so if you don't like typing on your phone or working on spreadsheets, you can access your document later on your laptop, using a click instead of a tap.

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