PNG to CSV

How to convert PNG to CSV

1. Add a PNG. A screenshot of a table, a chart legend, or a scanned grid.
2. Review the detected grid. Rows and columns are inferred from where the text sits.
3. Download the .csv. Opens in any spreadsheet, parses in any language.

About PNG to CSV

This is the best-case input for turning a picture of a table into data, and it is worth knowing why. PNG is lossless, so the letterforms in a screenshot are exactly the pixels the screen drew: no compression softening, no artefacts around the edges. Optical character recognition is a shape-matching problem, and clean shapes recognise better. Expect noticeably higher accuracy here than from a JPEG of the same table.

The common case is a table you can see but cannot copy: a figure inside a dashboard that only exports as an image, a grid in a slide deck, a report someone screenshotted and pasted into a message, a web table behind a login that resists selection. The data is right there and completely inert.

Tesseract recognises the text as WebAssembly in this browser tab, keeping the bounding box of every word. Words are grouped into rows by vertical position and columns are inferred from the x positions where words consistently begin. Screenshots do well at this because the alignment is machine-generated and therefore genuinely consistent: a photographed table has slight perspective that a screenshot never has.

The one thing that hurts a screenshot is scale. A table captured at a small size on a high-density display, or a screenshot that was resized down before you got it, has too few pixels per character for reliable recognition. Capture at full size where you can, and do not enlarge a small screenshot before running it: upscaling invents no detail and simply gives the recogniser blurrier shapes to work with.

PNG to CSV converter or copy and paste?

If the table is real text on a web page, select it and paste it straight into a spreadsheet: that will always beat recognition. This converter is for the other case: the table is pixels. A PNG pasted into a chat, a capture from a dashboard that only exports images, a scan someone saved as PNG. Nothing in it can be selected, so the pixels have to be read. Once you have the CSV it opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, and anything that parses comma-separated values.

Charts are a different matter. The tool reads text, so it will pick up a title, axis labels and legend entries, but it cannot turn the bars or lines themselves into numbers. For a chart you need the table that produced it.

Need the words with their positions instead of a grid? PNG to JSON gives you every word, its bounding box and its confidence. For the whole process, from capture to checking the result, see how to get a table out of a screenshot.

PNG to CSV FAQ