How to scan a document into Excel

Microsoft Excel is one of the best programs out there. Practically every business will use Microsoft Excel because of its wide variety of options from spreadsheets to scanning documents. If you are new to Excel, you may not know how to scan a document into Excel.

Here is a simple guide that will help you learn how to scan a document into Excel:

1. You need to get a nice scanner. It doesn't need to be the best scanner, but getting a nice one will allow for clear images to come through instead of pixilated images. Use a business card scanner, it's the best one to use if you only want to scan in your business card or small documents.

2. Now you need to use software that has accurate OCR or Optical Character Recognition. OCR software will tell Excel that you are sending a picture or image to your computer and it will read this data easier.

3. Pick the image you would like to scan. Most people choose something easy like their business card.

4. Scan the image in like you normally do with your scanner and then click on "Export to excel" using the OCR software.

5. The image will appear in Excel where you can move it around all the other information you may have in your cells.

Now the question lies, where can you find OCR software? You can find OCR software online from web sites like download.com. The top-rated OCR software programs on the market include CardScan, IrisCard, and Neat. This is because they are specifically designed to talk to Excel and it will easily walk you through the entire process of how to export images to Excel.

There are some people that like to scan documents in and then copy and paste them into Excel files. While this can work with some images, it is not the best way to get your image into Excel. This is because Excel is made up of different formulas and structured cells and it is not designed to read images the same way Paint and Photoshop are.

The OCR software will take the image and basically make it into an Excel spreadsheet file. Since an image is nothing more than a collection of pixels that are patterned together, you need to use OCR software to transform them into specific formats. Even Microsoft Word does not recognize images, which is why they often appear distorted or pixilated if you copy and paste them into your file.

To understand Word and Excel, you need to learn how an image is different to these programs. To help you understand, lets represent an image using letters. So you take your scanner or digital camera and you take a picture represented as `ABC'. Photoshop will recognize this image as ABC because this is how the program was designed to read pictures. Now when you try to transfer this image to Word or Excel, it will not read it as ABC, it will read it as a representation of the letter A, the letter B, and the letter C. Pictures are not only recognized as letters, but as numbers (which is how most graphic designers are able to change the image). In order for Word and Excel to read an image as ABC versus a representation of each letter, you have to use the OCR software to talk to the program and help it recognize it. Most of the new scanners on the market include OCR software so you don't need to purchase it separately. Be sure to find this out before you purchase the scanner.