I have a data table I would like to scan as an editable excel document. I scanned the file as a PDF, and was under the assumption that Adobe Reader(desktop not the Windows 10 app) was able to do it, but it turns out that feature cost money. I had my mother try it at work as her work computer has subscription to Adobe's services. Turns out it only turned it into an image and not an editable file. So, how can I scan a document into an editable excel file? Taking a picture with my S3 and then converting it to a excel file is also an option. Thank you.
ABBYY Fine Reader will do that for you, if all you have is one page it is overkill but I believe you get 30 days free trial. Twitter is to communications as haiku is to literature.
Google docs does a good job of OCR on many docs. For free. Not sure about spreadsheets. They ad new capabilities all the time without notice. Here's a short post on how to do Basic OCR http://computers.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-ocr-documents-for-free-in-google-drive--cms-20460
I enter all my credit card bills into a spreadsheet. Scan as PDF using Scansoft's Paperport. My process was to drop scan into a word processor (set to ascii input, note pad works well) first and using column mode extract the data to paste into the spreadsheet. Lately, after some anomaly with software and hardware updates, the OCR conversion to the word processor leaves out proper line feeds. I crop out each column as a separate pdf and just select OCR text directly from the PDF and paste to notepad. Make any edits in notepad and then paste into spreadsheet. You may want to play with selecting text from your PDF. edit: notice, that my method never uses an Adobe product other than the reader. edit #2, just tried a test paste into excel and it worked without the notepad step. At home I use quattro pro and I seem to recall that it pastes one long text into one cell. Excel worked like a champ.
Adobe Acrobat will export to a spreadsheet format and has an OCR feature. I find it works best to: - OCR - export to spreadsheet - open in Excel, save out ask .csv - open in a text editor and replace double commas w/ single until no more pairs are found - resave and re-open in Excel.
