How to Convert an Image to Excel on Mac with Data From Picture
Someone sends you a screenshot of a table, or you photograph a printed page, and you want the numbers in Excel without typing them. Excel for Mac has a feature for it called Data From Picture. It is one of the few tools that works well on images, and it needs no separate app. This guide covers how to use it, how to get a good result, and what to do when the feature is missing.
Quick answer: Press ⌃⌘⇧4 and drag over the table to copy a screenshot to the clipboard. In Excel, choose Insert > Data From Picture > Picture From Clipboard (Microsoft's announcement placed it under Insert; some versions show it on the Data tab). Review the preview, fix anything highlighted, then click Insert Data. It needs a Microsoft 365 subscription.
What Data From Picture does
It runs optical character recognition on an image of a table, finds rows and columns, and shows you what it found before anything touches your sheet. Microsoft introduced it for Excel on Mac in 2020, alongside the option to scan a table straight from an iPhone camera. It is not a general PDF converter, and it will not build formulas, but for a picture of a clean table it is the fastest route to editable cells.
Check you have it
The feature is available in Microsoft 365 subscription versions of Excel for Mac that are up to date. If you have a one-off purchase such as Office 2019 or 2021, or an old build, it may be missing. To check, open Excel > About Excel and note the version and licence type, then look under the Insert and Data tabs for the command. If you cannot find it, jump to the alternatives below.
Method 1: Screenshot from the clipboard
This is the quickest method, and it works for anything on your screen, including a table in a web page, an email image or a PDF.
Press ⌃⌘⇧4. The pointer becomes a crosshair.
Drag a rectangle around the table. Adding the Control key copies the screenshot to the clipboard instead of saving a file.
Click an empty cell in Excel, where the top left of the data should go.
Choose Insert > Data From Picture > Picture From Clipboard.
Wait for the analysis, then review the preview.
Click Insert Data.
Method 2: Picture from a file
If you have the image as a file, choose Picture From File and select it. This is better for photos and scans, because you can crop and straighten the image in Preview first.
Method 3: Scan with your iPhone
If you have an iPhone set up for Continuity Camera, right-click a cell in Excel and choose Scan Documents. Point the iPhone at the printed table, and the scan comes straight into Excel for the same review step. Your iPhone and Mac need to be signed in to the same Apple account for it to appear.
Get a better result from the picture
The quality of the input decides the quality of the output. A few habits make a large difference.
Crop tightly. Include only the table, with its header row. Remove the page title, logos and neighbouring text.
Shoot straight on. A table photographed at an angle gives skewed columns. Hold the camera parallel to the page.
Use good light and contrast. Avoid shadows across the page and glare on glossy paper.
Use a high resolution. A Retina screenshot is excellent. A small blurry thumbnail is not.
Keep the type reasonably large. Tiny print produces more mistakes.
Do one table at a time. Combined layouts confuse the column detection.
Review before you insert
The preview is the most important step. Excel shows the image beside the interpreted table and marks cells it is unsure about. Click through them and correct them in the dialog. Do not skip this: OCR mistakes are subtle, and the numbers are the part that matters.
| What the picture shows | What Excel may read | How to catch it |
|---|---|---|
| 0 (zero) | O (letter) | Number columns show left-aligned text |
| 1 (one) | l (lowercase L) or I | Sum is lower than the printed total |
| 5 | S | Number turns into text |
| Decimal point | Comma, or missing | Amounts off by a factor of 100 or 1000 |
| Minus sign or brackets | Dropped | Credits become debits |
| Two lines in one cell | Split into two rows | Blank cells in the first columns |
After you insert
The data arrives as normal cells, but a few checks are worth making.
Sum the numeric columns and compare with the total in the image.
Set formats. Numbers should be right-aligned, dates should be real dates. If some are stuck as text, our guide to cleaning pasted PDF data covers conversion.
Check headers and merged cells. Merged headings are the other thing that often needs repair.
Compare a few rows by eye against the picture, especially negatives and the first and last rows.
If the table started life as a PDF with selectable text, you do not need an image at all. Copying the text is more accurate, and our guide to copying a table from a PDF into Excel shows how.
If Data From Picture is missing or fails
Update Excel and confirm you have a Microsoft 365 subscription.
Try Live Text. macOS can select text in images in Preview and Photos. You can copy that text and paste it into Excel, but it comes as plain text, so expect to split it into columns afterwards, and do not assume table structure will survive.
Retype a small table. For ten rows, typing with a second pair of eyes checking is faster than fighting a tool.
Use an OCR tool for a large or poor-quality scan. Be wary of uploading sensitive pages to a website.
Common mistakes
Inserting without reviewing the preview.
Feeding it a full page rather than the table.
Trusting digits blindly. OCR confuses 0 and O, and 1 and l.
Overwriting existing data by choosing a cell that is not empty.
Treating it as a PDF converter. It reads images. A text-based PDF is better handled by copying.
Frequently asked questions
Is Data From Picture available on Mac?
Yes, in Excel for Mac with a Microsoft 365 subscription and an up-to-date build. One-off purchase versions may not include it.
Does it work offline?
We could not confirm how Microsoft processes the image. Check Microsoft's current documentation and privacy statement if that matters for your data.
Can it read handwriting?
It is designed for printed tables. Handwriting is unreliable, so expect heavy corrections.
How accurate is it?
It depends on the image. For a sharp, well-lit printed table it is often very good, but you should still check totals.
What is the shortcut for a clipboard screenshot?
Press Control, Command and Shift together with 4, then drag over the area. Leave out Control to save the screenshot as a file instead.