App Request: Table capture
There are a few really cool screen shot apps like text sniper, text scoop. I currently use text scoop but I’m wondering if there is one that can take a text sniper like copy of an excel, then paste it word or email and keep it as a table…
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“There are a few really cool screen shot apps like text sniper, text scoop. I currently use text scoop but I’m wondering if there is one that can take a text sniper like copy of an excel, then paste it word or email and keep it as a table…”There are a few really cool screen shot apps like text sniper, text scoop. I currently use text scoop but I’m wondering if there is one that can take a text sniper like copy of an excel, then paste it word or email and keep it as a table formatting.
Or somewhat similar, copy a table from word be smart and enough to paste in excel and respect the layout.
Yes one could use Claude for this but I’m curious if there is any native apps that do this.
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Have a look at SheetSnap. It was recently featured here.
SheetSnap: Table OCR — by Cass Tao Ratings: 0 (no ratings yet) Average: n/a ★ Age: released ~2 months ago · rated 4+ Overall score: 0 / 100
You can select/copy the cells in a spreadsheet and paste them as table in the average word processor.
For the screenshot-to-table direction, the cleanest near-native route is Excel itself if you have it. On the Data tab there's an Insert Data from Picture option that OCRs a screenshot or photo of a table straight into real cells, and it lets you fix any misreads before it commits. From there you can copy the range into Word or an email and the table formatting comes with it. The reason TextScoop and TextSniper don't quite do this is that they pull the text but flatten the layout, since they're built for plain text capture rather than grids. macOS Live Text (selecting text off an image in Quick Look or Preview) has the same limit. That's the gap the dedicated Table OCR apps people mentioned, like SheetSnap, are filling. For the Word-to-Excel direction you might not need anything extra. Copying a Word table and pasting into Excel already maps each cell to a cell for me, and going back the other way pastes as a real table. It's mainly the from-an-image case where you actually need OCR.
for screenshot-to-table, i'd split it into two cases. if the source is Excel/Numbers, copying the cells directly will usually preserve table structure better than OCR. if it is a screenshot/PDF, Excel's Insert Data from Picture is the first thing i'd test because it gives you a review step before turning it into cells. after that, paste into Word/Mail as a real table. i'd be suspicious of any app that skips the review step - table OCR is good until one merged cell or wrapped header shifts a column.
If you use Raycast there’s a simple extension that gives you this functionality
Worth separating the two things you asked about, because they're different problems with different fixes. Word/PDF table → Excel isn't an OCR problem at all, the structure is already there. Native copy-paste usually works, and when it doesn't it's because the thing landed as plain text or as an image. Paste Special → HTML in Excel almost always preserves the grid. If the source is a PDF, Tabula (free) pulls tables out with the structure intact, far more reliably than screenshotting them. Screenshot → table is the genuinely hard one, because OCR gives you characters and throws the grid away. That's why TextSniper and TextScoop hand you plain text, they're not table-aware. Excel's Insert Data from Picture (mentioned above) is table-aware, which is why it's the best near-native route, and SheetSnap is built for exactly this niche. Rule of thumb I'd use: only OCR when the structure is genuinely lost (a photo, a screenshot someone sent you). If the table exists digitally anywhere upstream, extract it rather than re-read it. A lot of the pain here comes from screenshotting something that could have just been copied.
Which extension?
Yeah no native app does this well. ScreenSnap Pro can pull text from screenshots but tables with proper formatting is asking a lot from any OCR tool rn.
Not at my computer right now, but it’s just in their standard repository. Search for raycast extensions in raycast or on Google and then for OCR