App Request: Table capture

The text-grabbers (TextSniper, TextScoop) flatten a table because they OCR line by line and throw away the columns. Reading the characters is easy. Knowing which text sits in which cell is the hard part, and that's the bit they skip. That's also why the Claude route works: it reconstructs the grid from the image instead of reading flat lines. Deterministic trick if you want to stay off an LLM: you need OCR that keeps each word's position, then group by vertical position for rows and horizontal for columns, and output as TSV. Pasting TSV into Excel splits into columns on its own. Word too. Full disclosure, I build a screenshot tool SlimSnap that does the position-aware OCR part (it outputs JSON with each element's coordinates), but it's aimed at handing structured data to a coding agent, not pasting into Excel, so it's not a drop-in for exactly what you want. The coordinate approach is the reason your problem is solvable though.

Have a look at SheetSnap. It was recently featured here.

SheetSnap: Table OCR — by Cass Tao Ratings: 0 (no ratings yet) Average: n/a ★ Age: released ~2 months ago · rated 4+ Overall score: 0 / 100

If you use Raycast there’s a simple extension that gives you this functionality

Not at my computer right now, but it’s just in their standard repository. Search for raycast extensions in raycast or on Google and then for OCR

You can select/copy the cells in a spreadsheet and paste them as table in the average word processor.

For the screenshot-to-table direction, the cleanest near-native route is Excel itself if you have it. On the Data tab there's an Insert Data from Picture option that OCRs a screenshot or photo of a table straight into real cells, and it lets you fix any misreads before it commits. From there you can copy the range into Word or an email and the table formatting comes with it. The reason TextScoop and TextSniper don't quite do this is that they pull the text but flatten the layout, since they're built for plain text capture rather than grids. macOS Live Text (selecting text off an image in Quick Look or Preview) has the same limit. That's the gap the dedicated Table OCR apps people mentioned, like SheetSnap, are filling. For the Word-to-Excel direction you might not need anything extra. Copying a Word table and pasting into Excel already maps each cell to a cell for me, and going back the other way pastes as a real table. It's mainly the from-an-image case where you actually need OCR.

for screenshot-to-table, i'd split it into two cases. if the source is Excel/Numbers, copying the cells directly will usually preserve table structure better than OCR. if it is a screenshot/PDF, Excel's Insert Data from Picture is the first thing i'd test because it gives you a review step before turning it into cells. after that, paste into Word/Mail as a real table. i'd be suspicious of any app that skips the review step - table OCR is good until one merged cell or wrapped header shifts a column.

For screenshot-of-a-table into real Excel rows, the OCR tools you named (TextSniper) plus something like TableTool for the paste-cleanup is the usual combo. Nothing I've found nails "respect the layout" perfectly. If your actual goal is feeding that table to Claude rather than into a spreadsheet, there are tools that OCR to structured JSON with each cell's position, which an agent reads better than a pasted image. Different endpoint though, not a spreadsheet.

Worth separating the two things you asked about, because they're different problems with different fixes. Word/PDF table → Excel isn't an OCR problem at all, the structure is already there. Native copy-paste usually works, and when it doesn't it's because the thing landed as plain text or as an image. Paste Special → HTML in Excel almost always preserves the grid. If the source is a PDF, Tabula (free) pulls tables out with the structure intact, far more reliably than screenshotting them. Screenshot → table is the genuinely hard one, because OCR gives you characters and throws the grid away. That's why TextSniper and TextScoop hand you plain text, they're not table-aware. Excel's Insert Data from Picture (mentioned above) is table-aware, which is why it's the best near-native route, and SheetSnap is built for exactly this niche. Rule of thumb I'd use: only OCR when the structure is genuinely lost (a photo, a screenshot someone sent you). If the table exists digitally anywhere upstream, extract it rather than re-read it. A lot of the pain here comes from screenshotting something that could have just been copied.