New version of mobile MS Office can convert photos into Excel spreadsheets

Have you ever had to work with a table in a book or a paper, and know you have a lovely long bout with Excel ahead to replicate it in order to complete your task? Microsoft may have finally developed a solution to this problem. The Redmond company has announced that an update to Office will allow a user to take a picture of a table and convert it into a working Excel spreadsheet.

This impressive new trick will use optical character recognition (OCR), possibly in conjunction with AI, to help the user avoid the necessity of copying data into a table from scratch. The user can then edit the resulting spreadsheet at will. Microsoft has indicated that the OCR involved will replicate the rows and columns in a photographed table with complete fidelity. No more data-entry required!

On the other hand, the new function may not be completely reliable in all cases. Nevertheless, it will be much more convenient compared to typing every field into Excel as necessary. This new image-processing property of Excel's is currently available to the Android version of this app. Microsoft says that this will quickly be followed by iOS support. Unfortunately, it also requires a subscription to Office 365 at present.