You would have the additional task of separating and removing the preprinted grid from the content. And if the content overlaps preprinted lines, that introduces breaks and missing data that the computer can't easily handle. Figuring out what of that is important to you, and what could potentially be some kind of character to be translated is extremely difficult. To the computer, everything that isn't the background color is 'something'. You can recognize how things are aligned, and what goes with what based on context. When you look at those images, your brain is very good at sorting out what is 'preprinted form', what is content, what is noise, and what is human markings that aren't relevant. That's just the task of assigning text to the right cell based on its position. But even the best can be far from perfect. Recognizing the handwritten characters and translating them to text.Ĭonsumer software and online services are available and do a reasonable job of converting machine-printed text that is in clean table format to a spreadsheet file.Recognizing the layout and translating that to cell locations.

Distinguishing 'content' from non-content.There are at least three difficult tasks: With any computer to which you would have access, you can't do anything useful to go from handwritten records to Excel. I have to agree with music2myear’s answer.

Turn pdf into excel table