How to Convert a Picture to Excel
You have a table in a photo, a screenshot, or a PDF, and retyping it by hand is the last thing you want to do. Excel can read a picture straight into cells — here's how, on desktop and phone, and what to do when the table is too messy for it.
The quick answer: in Microsoft 365, use Data → From Picture on desktop, or Insert → Data from Picture in the Excel mobile app. Excel reads the table out of the image and drops it into cells. Below: how to do it cleanly, and what to do when the table is too messy — or stuck inside a PDF.
On your phone — Insert Data from Picture
The mobile app is the most reliable route because the camera gives Excel a fresh, high-resolution image. Open a workbook in the Excel app, tap the Insert tab, and choose Data from Picture. Point the camera at the printed table or select an existing photo. Excel scans it, shows you the detected grid, and lets you correct anything before it lands in the sheet.
On desktop — Data → From Picture
In Microsoft 365 for Windows, go to the Data tab and click From Picture. You get two options: Picture from File (choose a saved image) or Picture from Clipboard (paste a screenshot you just took). Excel runs OCR on the image and opens a review pane with the table it found.
Review before you insert
This is the step people skip and regret. Excel highlights every cell it is unsure about — a smudged digit, a merged heading, a stray comma. Fix those in the review pane, then click Insert Data. Correcting a handful of flagged cells now is much quicker than hunting for wrong numbers across a finished sheet later.
When it is a screenshot of text
If your "picture" is actually a screenshot of selectable text — say, a table copied from a web page as an image — you may be able to paste the underlying text into a cell and then use Data → Text to Columns to split it on commas, tabs, or spaces. That skips OCR entirely and is exact when it works.
The messy-table shortcut
The real pain is rarely one tidy table — it is a PDF report with tables across several pages, or a messy export you then have to clean before you can even use it. Instead of screenshotting each page, you can upload the whole file to Quiriz, which reads PDFs and messy spreadsheets directly, and then just ask a question about it in plain English. You skip both the retyping and the cleanup.
Skip the retyping — ask your file a question
Upload a messy spreadsheet or a PDF with tables and ask a question in plain English. No cleanup, no OCR cleanup, no pivot tables. Free to try.
Try Quiriz free →