Anyone has any code example(s) for Get and Transform Data from picture

[Monty Norman]

Hello All,

I tried to record a macro to see what the code looks like to "import" data from images and it only recorded some range selection, and Column AutoFits.

I have about 3000 images, mostly .JPG and I get 300 per day, of screen shots of process data, so code is the best way to get this data into a worksheet.

Thanks in advance.

Monty

 

[Dan_W]

Hi. Unfortunately, Microsoft has not exposed this functionality to VBA, and so you would need to find some other way of getting the data from the images. There are many online OCR services (some with free tiers) - Microsoft, Google, Amazon all have this kind of service. Alternatively, if you're not able to send the files for processing in the cloud, you could try desktop solutions - there are plenty of open source options like Tesseract, etc.

 

[Monty Norman]

Hi. Unfortunately, Microsoft has not exposed this functionality to VBA, and so you would need to find some other way of getting the data from the images. There are many online OCR services (some with free tiers) - Microsoft, Google, Amazon all have this kind of service. Alternatively, if you're not able to send the files for processing in the cloud, you could try desktop solutions - there are plenty of open source options like Tesseract, etc.

Thanks @Dan_W I know this is a new feature, and I am doubly hoping that MS soon will give us some VBA code to be able to do this.

For now, its one image at a time!

 

[Dan_W]

Thanks @Dan_W I know this is a new feature, and I am doubly hoping that MS soon will give us some VBA code to be able to do this.

For now, its one image at a time!

Microsoft stopped adding VBA access to its new features a while back. There are still hacky ways of executing those features in VBA, and I've managed to kinda do it here too, but it's unreliable. I can only get it to open the pane - it is then very challenging to 'click' the button to process the image. Because it engages the clipboard too, the whole thing is unreliable.

If you are able to install things on the computer, you might want to look at AutoHotKey. There are a few OCR solutions available there, but it all depends on the quality of your picture.

Actually, there is one more solution that produces impressive results - you may have heard of a Microsoft program called PowerToys. Basically, it's a collection of tools - like colour picker, etc. There is a new tool there that extracts text from a designated part of the screen (basically, an image) - PowerToys Text Extractor utility for Windows . I've looked at the code for this tool, and it appears to use functionality built into Windows 10 (and doubtless, 11) - I suspect the Excel Get Data from Picture uses this same OCR engine, but I might be wrong. In any event, I find the tools ability to extract text to be very good, but I haven't worked out how to access it from VBA yet.

 

[alansidman]

See if this tutorial helps you-->

 

[Dan_W]

Sorry, I might have misunderstood - I thought that this is what OP was referring to, but wanted to know how to engage this function programmatically with VBA given the volume of images that needed to be processed. If I misunderstood, apologies for my various musings/ramblings above!