If you like manually entering information/text from jpg’s and images please disregard this post…
I think this is a handy tip though.
Say I have a low quality jpeg that looks like below.. I want all the text from it.. but the problem is, it is an image..!
Not a problem!.. read below.
Open the image in Adobe Acrobat Pro.. im using version XI… but you can use version 9 too.
From the edit menu select “Edit Text & images”
A new bar appears on the right.. in the “Text Recognition Section” – select “in this file”.. (You can also do this for multiple files)
If you just want what you are looking at select the “current page” otherwise select all pages
Now the magic happens.. all the text is selectable… just copy and paste to wherever you need it.
Now in excel
To avoid column-merging of data when pasting into Excel, I find the result more reliable when I draw a selection around the table with the Selection Tool (Black Arrow) and then use Copy (Ctrl+C). You don’t have to be exact with your selection, just make sure the table is within the selection.
If you want more control of the data, instead of copying your selection; right-click and choose Export Selection As, then choose Excel Workbook and finally click on the Setting buttons to see the extended options. In the Settings you can get Acrobat to detect decimal and thousands separators or even use the OCR setting in there instead. You can also set the language for the OCR which is sometime useful when encountering Cyrillic characters and foreign languages.