Episode 2490:
The Android phone has had it for a long time, but the new Data From Picture has finally reached the Office Insiders beta channel on desktop Excel. Bill gives this new feature a spin with various pictures of data.
Table of Contents
(0:00) Speech Recognition 1989 to today
(1:10) From Picture near Power Query tools
(1:35) Creating data picture
(2:00) Data From Picture no gridlines
(3:40) Cleaning the results
(4:15) The numbers all match
(4:30) Gridlines don't help
(5:35) Right-align headings
(7:20) Need to proof
(7:50) With real photo test 1
(8:40) From clipboard test 2
(10:03) This will improve
The Android phone has had it for a long time, but the new Data From Picture has finally reached the Office Insiders beta channel on desktop Excel. Bill gives this new feature a spin with various pictures of data.
Table of Contents
(0:00) Speech Recognition 1989 to today
(1:10) From Picture near Power Query tools
(1:35) Creating data picture
(2:00) Data From Picture no gridlines
(3:40) Cleaning the results
(4:15) The numbers all match
(4:30) Gridlines don't help
(5:35) Right-align headings
(7:20) Need to proof
(7:50) With real photo test 1
(8:40) From clipboard test 2
(10:03) This will improve
Transcript of the video:
Oh, it's so exciting. People on the Android Excel have had this for years.
And now it's finally here. Data from Picture comes to desktop Excel.
Let's take a look. Now look, I have to tell you a little story.
This was 1989, I was fresh out of college. I was working for a company in Akron, Ohio.
A big company meeting.
The president of the company was speaking and he brought up our chief engineer, a great guy named Raj, right?
And Raj was there to demo this amazing new ability where someone could speak to one of our computers that we manufactured.
Poor Raj, in front of 200 people, it was a Crash and burn.
It missed almost everything he said. That was 1989.
And today, 2022, watch what we can do. Alexa, what time is it?
(Alexa) The time is 6:24 AM.
(Bill) We can talk to these devices all day and it just works. I don't want to be negative here.
This is like a version 2 of this feature and they're going to get there.
It may not be there today, but it's a great first step.
Check this out.
On the data tab, right here in the Power Query group, this new thing called from picture that has nothing to do with Power Query. Doesn't run it through Power Query.
It seems like it's a pretty weird place to add it, but okay.
Where are we going to get the data to test this out?
I could be a real jerk and go out to Unsplash and grab a photo of some data, but that wouldn't be fair.
So let's give them a good shot and create nicely formed data. Here's a fast look at how I did it.
Fill handle for months, fill handle for names, a RANDARRAY to fill in the numbers, pace values, February is currency, April with a comma, May a little bit wider, WinSnap, Gridlines off, WinSnap again.
All right, so we're going to try that out. Data from Picture.
We have a choice either from a file or from a clipboard.
I'll choose the one with no gridlines. Over here, we're analyzing your image 6%, 7%.
That was fast, right?
And under review, they say there were two things they're not sure of.
I had the word Flo, a lady's name, Flo, and they chose F-I-O.
All right, good. Let me fix that one.
Good catch, Excel. And then Ike, which is actually correct.
Capital I-K-E. That one's correct.
All right. We do the review and then accept.
Insert data. They're going to warn me.
You are responsible for validating the accuracy of all data, right?
So you read that and then click insert data. Okay.
Let's compare this to the original photo. Hang on a second.
All right, so what did we learn?
You see that I left the labels, left a line, that's the way that they came out and that caused a lot of misalignment.
But the thing that really seemed to have caused problems was here in the February column.
Some of the numbers are four digits before the decimal and some are five, and that seemed to confuse things.
I'm not sure why Excel thought that 15293 and $19,907 should be in the same cell. But let's be positive here.
They did actually get all the numbers, right. I went through and checked them all.
And starting from this, I could use some Excel skills to clean this up faster than it would've taken me to type the whole thing.
Here's a quick look at that.
It's a lot of cutting and pasting at first, deleting some columns, and then getting stuff out of the way so I could do a Text to columns, and I actually missed the Text to columns so I'm going to have to do another Text to columns there.
More cutting and pasting. Delete two columns.
Again, here's the original picture. Here's after I cleaned up the data.
Here's a paste of the original data. It did get 100% of them, right.
So, that's a really good first test.
I wondered if shooting the photo with the gridlines in would actually help.
Like maybe that would kind of queue Excel that this Jan and all of these belong together.
Unfortunately though, Data from Picture, picture from file with gridlines, all right. Same issue with Flo.
Oddly enough, right?
Having the gridlines there actually cause problems.
Like this 5323, I lost the five and the 00 changed to what is that lowercase O's.
So, that's really strange that having gridlines really seem to have caused more problems.
The thing that did really seem to help is lining all of the headings up with the column.
And of course, you know, if you had the ability to do that, you wouldn't need this from picture thing, but at least it gives you an idea of which pictures might have a better shot.
I also made all the columns really wide, so there was no chance that they're going to think that dollar sign belongs to January.
We'll try this one. Data from Picture, from file.
Analyzing your image.
Now, it's interesting that there were far more to review here.
Like they weren't sure about the word June for some reason, that was correct.
207, the 1523 they randomly put a decimal point in, which seems weird, but at least they were worried enough about it to ask me. The 1538 they put a decimal point in.
And by the way, I'm using the default font, I'm using the default Excel font.
It's not like I'm throwing some weird font at them.
Gary, that one's right. Ike, that one's right.
And then insert data.
Yes, you're responsible for validating the accuracy of all data.
How did this one do? Let's do this comparison.
Okay.
I'm going to paste in the real data here and then we'll come out and just do a test for equality.
Is the from picture data equal to the original data?
And copy that, 456, paste. Ah, yeah.
Right. That actually introduced one error.
They put B-A space R-B instead of Barb and didn't catch it.
I want to love this feature and I know that they're going to get there.
It's going to be an amazing feature someday.
But right now I feel like every time I use it, I'm going to have to go through and do a lot of proofing to make myself comfortable that it's working.
And I'm giving them the best shot here in that I created this data in Excel and then took a picture of it from Excel.
If it was a real photo, ugh.
They do say consider the lighting, camera angles, and cropping the image to focus on the table to help us extract the data more accurately.
This is just a mess. Six items require review.
And I can't even tell really what they're highlighting in the photo.
I'll just accept all and insert data.
I've looked at this a couple of times. I'm not even sure what is going on.
Let's be nicer and crop it down to just those two columns.
I'll right click here and copy. And then from picture, from clipboard.
All right, good. At least they knew it was two columns.
The 180.98, I can see that there, the -0.21, which is kind of cropped at the top, they just left me the 1.
So maybe we throw out that first row, maybe that wasn't fair. +74.21, -6.87, that looks good.
Here, for some reason they put those two in the same column.
I'll just accept it all and we'll see what we get here.
And then insert data. All right.
It actually started out ... No.
The 180.98, the 740.21, but where did the 122.56, how did that become 113.11?
Now, hey, this is, I mean, it's definitely not fair.
Look at how these are ... It was a round display board.
This probably was not realistic to throw at them at all.
They're going to get there, right?
Voice recognition back in 1989 was terrible, but here we are 30 years later and it all works great.
With the right data set, there's a good chance that this will actually save you some time, but you definitely need to be careful and proof those results.
Now, it's kind of exciting.
You know, we haven't had a chance to play with this.
It's been on Android for a long time, but I don't have an Android phone. This is great to give it a try.
It's kind of like Christmas, but it reminds me of that Christmas where my cousin Joe gave me a sweatshirt instead of toys.
You know, it's Christmas, but it's just not what you were hoping for.
So, hey, if you're on Office Insiders, you have this new Data from Picture. Give it a try.
Let me know down in the YouTube comments, if you had any success with it.
Well, Hey, I want to thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from Mr. Excel.
And now it's finally here. Data from Picture comes to desktop Excel.
Let's take a look. Now look, I have to tell you a little story.
This was 1989, I was fresh out of college. I was working for a company in Akron, Ohio.
A big company meeting.
The president of the company was speaking and he brought up our chief engineer, a great guy named Raj, right?
And Raj was there to demo this amazing new ability where someone could speak to one of our computers that we manufactured.
Poor Raj, in front of 200 people, it was a Crash and burn.
It missed almost everything he said. That was 1989.
And today, 2022, watch what we can do. Alexa, what time is it?
(Alexa) The time is 6:24 AM.
(Bill) We can talk to these devices all day and it just works. I don't want to be negative here.
This is like a version 2 of this feature and they're going to get there.
It may not be there today, but it's a great first step.
Check this out.
On the data tab, right here in the Power Query group, this new thing called from picture that has nothing to do with Power Query. Doesn't run it through Power Query.
It seems like it's a pretty weird place to add it, but okay.
Where are we going to get the data to test this out?
I could be a real jerk and go out to Unsplash and grab a photo of some data, but that wouldn't be fair.
So let's give them a good shot and create nicely formed data. Here's a fast look at how I did it.
Fill handle for months, fill handle for names, a RANDARRAY to fill in the numbers, pace values, February is currency, April with a comma, May a little bit wider, WinSnap, Gridlines off, WinSnap again.
All right, so we're going to try that out. Data from Picture.
We have a choice either from a file or from a clipboard.
I'll choose the one with no gridlines. Over here, we're analyzing your image 6%, 7%.
That was fast, right?
And under review, they say there were two things they're not sure of.
I had the word Flo, a lady's name, Flo, and they chose F-I-O.
All right, good. Let me fix that one.
Good catch, Excel. And then Ike, which is actually correct.
Capital I-K-E. That one's correct.
All right. We do the review and then accept.
Insert data. They're going to warn me.
You are responsible for validating the accuracy of all data, right?
So you read that and then click insert data. Okay.
Let's compare this to the original photo. Hang on a second.
All right, so what did we learn?
You see that I left the labels, left a line, that's the way that they came out and that caused a lot of misalignment.
But the thing that really seemed to have caused problems was here in the February column.
Some of the numbers are four digits before the decimal and some are five, and that seemed to confuse things.
I'm not sure why Excel thought that 15293 and $19,907 should be in the same cell. But let's be positive here.
They did actually get all the numbers, right. I went through and checked them all.
And starting from this, I could use some Excel skills to clean this up faster than it would've taken me to type the whole thing.
Here's a quick look at that.
It's a lot of cutting and pasting at first, deleting some columns, and then getting stuff out of the way so I could do a Text to columns, and I actually missed the Text to columns so I'm going to have to do another Text to columns there.
More cutting and pasting. Delete two columns.
Again, here's the original picture. Here's after I cleaned up the data.
Here's a paste of the original data. It did get 100% of them, right.
So, that's a really good first test.
I wondered if shooting the photo with the gridlines in would actually help.
Like maybe that would kind of queue Excel that this Jan and all of these belong together.
Unfortunately though, Data from Picture, picture from file with gridlines, all right. Same issue with Flo.
Oddly enough, right?
Having the gridlines there actually cause problems.
Like this 5323, I lost the five and the 00 changed to what is that lowercase O's.
So, that's really strange that having gridlines really seem to have caused more problems.
The thing that did really seem to help is lining all of the headings up with the column.
And of course, you know, if you had the ability to do that, you wouldn't need this from picture thing, but at least it gives you an idea of which pictures might have a better shot.
I also made all the columns really wide, so there was no chance that they're going to think that dollar sign belongs to January.
We'll try this one. Data from Picture, from file.
Analyzing your image.
Now, it's interesting that there were far more to review here.
Like they weren't sure about the word June for some reason, that was correct.
207, the 1523 they randomly put a decimal point in, which seems weird, but at least they were worried enough about it to ask me. The 1538 they put a decimal point in.
And by the way, I'm using the default font, I'm using the default Excel font.
It's not like I'm throwing some weird font at them.
Gary, that one's right. Ike, that one's right.
And then insert data.
Yes, you're responsible for validating the accuracy of all data.
How did this one do? Let's do this comparison.
Okay.
I'm going to paste in the real data here and then we'll come out and just do a test for equality.
Is the from picture data equal to the original data?
And copy that, 456, paste. Ah, yeah.
Right. That actually introduced one error.
They put B-A space R-B instead of Barb and didn't catch it.
I want to love this feature and I know that they're going to get there.
It's going to be an amazing feature someday.
But right now I feel like every time I use it, I'm going to have to go through and do a lot of proofing to make myself comfortable that it's working.
And I'm giving them the best shot here in that I created this data in Excel and then took a picture of it from Excel.
If it was a real photo, ugh.
They do say consider the lighting, camera angles, and cropping the image to focus on the table to help us extract the data more accurately.
This is just a mess. Six items require review.
And I can't even tell really what they're highlighting in the photo.
I'll just accept all and insert data.
I've looked at this a couple of times. I'm not even sure what is going on.
Let's be nicer and crop it down to just those two columns.
I'll right click here and copy. And then from picture, from clipboard.
All right, good. At least they knew it was two columns.
The 180.98, I can see that there, the -0.21, which is kind of cropped at the top, they just left me the 1.
So maybe we throw out that first row, maybe that wasn't fair. +74.21, -6.87, that looks good.
Here, for some reason they put those two in the same column.
I'll just accept it all and we'll see what we get here.
And then insert data. All right.
It actually started out ... No.
The 180.98, the 740.21, but where did the 122.56, how did that become 113.11?
Now, hey, this is, I mean, it's definitely not fair.
Look at how these are ... It was a round display board.
This probably was not realistic to throw at them at all.
They're going to get there, right?
Voice recognition back in 1989 was terrible, but here we are 30 years later and it all works great.
With the right data set, there's a good chance that this will actually save you some time, but you definitely need to be careful and proof those results.
Now, it's kind of exciting.
You know, we haven't had a chance to play with this.
It's been on Android for a long time, but I don't have an Android phone. This is great to give it a try.
It's kind of like Christmas, but it reminds me of that Christmas where my cousin Joe gave me a sweatshirt instead of toys.
You know, it's Christmas, but it's just not what you were hoping for.
So, hey, if you're on Office Insiders, you have this new Data from Picture. Give it a try.
Let me know down in the YouTube comments, if you had any success with it.
Well, Hey, I want to thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from Mr. Excel.
