How to Copy a Table from a Screenshot into Excel (No Retyping)

In a hurry? Open the screenshot, drag a selection over the table, hit Copy All, paste into Excel. On a Mac an OCR tool like iShot does the reading; the whole move is about ten seconds. The long version, including the cases where it fights back, is below.

It always arrives the same way: a table that exists as an image. A client’s price list pasted into chat. A dashboard exported as PNG. A PDF page screenshotted because exporting was “broken.” The text is already on your screen — you just can’t select it. So you retype it, cell by cell, checking every number twice because a typo in a spreadsheet is worse than a missing one. Twenty minutes gone on work that was finished before it started.

Why you can’t select text in an image

A screenshot is pixels — there are no characters underneath for your cursor to grab. macOS has shipped a fix since Monterey: Live Text runs OCR (text recognition) on images, so the machine reads the pixels back into real characters. The catch is what happens next: Live Text gives you the text, but a table pasted as plain text lands in one cell or one column unless the line and cell breaks come with it. That part is where tools differ.

Method 1: Live Text (built in, good for a few cells)

Open the image in Preview, hover over the text, drag to select, ⌘C, paste into Excel. For a handful of values that’s the fastest route. For a real table it gets tedious: you select row by row, the reading order jumps around, and numbers with odd spacing paste in dirty. Workable, not pleasant.

Method 2: drag once, copy everything

A dedicated OCR tool collapses the loop. With iShot’s OCR, you press the capture shortcut, drag a box around the whole table, and get two choices:

• Copy Selected — just the rows you boxed, line breaks preserved, so each row pastes into its own spreadsheet row.
• Copy All — everything the capture contains, in reading order. Best for a full-table grab.

The OCR runs on your Mac (Apple’s Vision framework), so nothing gets uploaded. Paste into Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, or Notion and the row structure comes along — one line per row, tab or space gaps where the columns were.

Getting the paste right

• One column instead of many? Paste first, then use Data → Text to Columns (Excel) or Split text to columns (Sheets) on the space or tab separator.
• Numbers pasted as text? Select the range, set the column format to Number, re-paste with Paste Special → Values.
• Spot-check the risky cells. OCR is very good on screen text, but a 0/O or 1/l in a low-res screenshot is worth one glance — cheaper than a wrong invoice.

When the table is longer than the screen

If the source is a scrolling page — a Notion board, a long invoice list — screenshotting the visible part loses the rest. Take a scrolling capture first, then run the OCR selection on the tall image. Same ten seconds, whole table.

Frequently asked questions

Can Excel read text from an image?

Not natively. Excel for Mac has no built-in image-to-table import, so you run the text through OCR first and paste the result in. Data from a screenshot lands as editable cells once it’s text on your clipboard.

How do I extract a table from a PNG on a Mac?

Drag an OCR selection over the table and copy. On macOS you can use Live Text in Preview, or a capture tool like iShot that returns the whole selection as lines with Copy All — then paste into your spreadsheet.

Does this work in Google Sheets and Numbers?

Yes — pasted text doesn’t care which spreadsheet it lands in. Sheets and Numbers split rows on line breaks the same way; use their split-to-columns tools if the columns arrive merged.