When optical character recognition (OCR) meets artificial intelligence, their combination makes it possible to work wonders. Microsoft is taking advantage of this technology alliance to introduce a very useful new feature in Excel. Announced a few months ago, this feature makes it possible to automatically duplicate a table in the app, starting from a printed document, without the user having to do it manually. It must be said that such a task is quite time-consuming.
Excel: it becomes possible to convert a photo into a table
With the new feature “Add Data from Image”, simply Take a photo of a paper document to convert it into an Excel spreadsheet fully editable. Therefore, you can make all the necessary adjustments to clean the table without difficulty. Microsoft claims his blog said the feature has “started rolling out” to Excel for Android (Office 365), pending its arrival on iOS.
Tremendous progress has been made in artificial intelligence as well as in optical character recognition. The Google Lens app is a perfect example. It allows you to recognize any (or nearly) object by taking a picture of it on your smartphone. You can also crop text from an image using OCR.
“Add Data from Picture” is not the only new feature based on artificial intelligence. Microsoft also announced the distribution of “Ideas”, which makes it possible to suggest actions to the Excel user according to the ongoing task. By doing this the app helps him create professional documents, presentations and spreadsheets. Ideas are also announced in PowerPoint.
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