TableSnip

Snip a table from anywhere on your screen and paste it straight into Excel or Google Sheets.

Works on any table you can see: a PDF, a web page, a chart in a slide deck, a screenshot someone sent you. Everything runs on your PC, nothing is uploaded.

Download

From the latest release:

• TableSnip-Setup-<version>.exe (recommended). Installs per user with no admin prompt, adds a Start Menu entry, and can open TableSnip at sign-in so Ctrl+Alt+T is always ready. Everything it needs is included; nothing else to install.
• TableSnip-<version>-win-x64.zip (portable). Unzip anywhere and run TableSnip.exe. Needs the .NET 8 Desktop Runtime, which Windows offers to install on first launch if it is missing.

Both need Windows 10 (1809+) or Windows 11, 64-bit. The files are not code-signed, so SmartScreen may show "Windows protected your PC" the first time; click More info → Run anyway.

Use it

1. Start TableSnip.
2. Press Snip table (or Ctrl+Alt+T from any app) and drag a box around the table.
3. Switch to Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers or Word and press Ctrl+V.

That's it. The table is on your clipboard the moment the snip is read, so step 3 is the only thing left to do. The window shows what was read so you can check it, fix a cell (double-click), delete a row (select its number, press Delete) or save it as CSV.

Closing the window keeps TableSnip in the system tray so Ctrl+Alt+T keeps working. Click the tray icon to bring the window back, or right-click it to quit.

Other ways in:

• Ctrl+V inside TableSnip pastes a screenshot from the clipboard (for example one taken with Win+Shift+S).
• Drop an image file on the window, or open one with the folder button (Ctrl+O).
• Columns: fewer / more slider. If two columns were glued together, drag towards more; if a column was split in two, drag towards fewer. The clipboard updates as you drag.

Tips for best results:

• Snip only the table, not the paragraph above it.
• Small text reads badly. Zoom the source in (Ctrl + scroll in a browser or PDF viewer) before snipping. Text 12 px tall or more is comfortably readable.

How it works

• Two OCR engines vote. The OCR built into Windows 10/11 (Windows.Media.Ocr) is fast and good at short tokens but regularly drops numbers such as 1,200,000. Tesseract 5 (bundled, with the English fast model) is the opposite. Each engine reads the snip twice at different scales; the readings are clustered by position and the text most engines agree on wins, with a small plausibility score to break ties (1,ooo loses to 1,000).
• Rows and columns come from geometry. Words are grouped into rows by their vertical centre, into cells by the horizontal gaps between them, and cells are aligned into columns by overlap. Rows whose cell count matches the most common count define the column skeleton; the others are fitted onto it. Columns that never share a row are merged, which fixes short headers above wide right-aligned numbers.
• Two clipboard formats. Tab-separated text (what Excel and Sheets parse into cells) and an HTML table (what Word, Outlook and Gmail turn into a real table).

Build

Requires the .NET 8 SDK on Windows 10 (1809+) or Windows 11.

dotnet build src\TableSnip\TableSnip.csproj -c Release

Make a distributable

.\publish.ps1 -Installer

This produces, in dist\:

• TableSnip-Setup-<version>.exe, the installer to share. It is self-contained (bundles the .NET runtime), installs per user without an admin prompt, registers an uninstaller, and offers "open at sign-in" and desktop-shortcut options. Built with Inno Setup 6 from installer\TableSnip.iss; install it once with winget install JRSoftware.InnoSetup.
• TableSnip-<version>-win-x64.zip, the portable build: a single TableSnip.exe plus the tessdata\ and x64\ folders it needs beside it, about 11 MB. Needs the .NET 8 Desktop Runtime on the target PC. Add -SelfContained to bundle the runtime here too.

Tesseract's native library needs the Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2022 runtime. When a Visual Studio installation is present (it is on GitHub's build runners) its three DLLs are bundled app-local; when they are not bundled, the installer downloads the runtime from Microsoft on PCs that lack it.

Leave out -Installer to build only the zip. Pass -Version 1.2.3 to stamp a version; otherwise the one in the csproj is used.

To publish a release on GitHub, tag a commit and push the tag:

git tag v1.0.0
git push origin v1.0.0

The Release workflow in .github/workflows builds the installer and the zip on a Windows runner and attaches both to a GitHub Release with generated notes. Every push to main also runs the Build workflow, which uploads them as downloadable artifacts.

The app is not code-signed, so SmartScreen may show "Windows protected your PC" on first launch. Click More info → Run anyway.

Command line

TableSnip can also run headless, which is handy for scripts and for testing the table logic:

TableSnip.exe --file table.png                 # tab-separated table on stdout
TableSnip.exe --file table.png --out table.tsv
TableSnip.exe --file table.png --copy          # put the table on the clipboard
TableSnip.exe --file table.png --json          # raw words with bounding boxes
TableSnip.exe --file table.png --gap 1.4       # column sensitivity (1 = default, >1 fewer columns)
TableSnip.exe --snip                           # start straight into snip mode

tools\make-test-tables.ps1 renders a set of synthetic tables into test-tables\ for checking changes to the recognition or layout code.

Project layout

src/TableSnip/
  Core/Recognizer.cs      runs both engines, clusters and votes
  Core/WindowsOcr.cs      Windows.Media.Ocr wrapper (de-skew, two scales)
  Core/TesseractOcr.cs    Tesseract wrapper
  Core/TableBuilder.cs    words with boxes -> rows and columns
  Core/ClipboardTable.cs  TSV + CF_HTML clipboard payloads, CSV export
  Core/ImageUtil.cs       upscaling, grayscale, alpha fixes for clipboard images
  MainWindow.xaml(.cs)    the one window
  SnipWindow.xaml(.cs)    full-screen selection overlay (one per monitor)
  Interop/HotKey.cs       global Ctrl+Alt+T
  tessdata/               Tesseract English model (Apache 2.0)

Limitations

• Cells that wrap onto two lines come out as two rows.
• Merged/spanning cells are placed in their left-most column.
• English only for now. Windows OCR follows your installed language packs; Tesseract ships with English. Other Tesseract languages can be dropped into tessdata\ and would need a small code change to be picked up.

Licences

TableSnip itself: MIT. Tesseract and its language data: Apache 2.0.