Abbyy FineReader's Analyze Table Structure Tool

Abbyy FineReader is application for rendering OCR from document images. I've gotten results using it which were significantly better than what I've achieved with Adobe Acrobat and other applications. My favorite feature of FineReader is the tool which allows you analyze the structure of a table. If you have chart or table which does not have evenly divided rows, you can use this tool to automatically detect where they begin and end. The tool will also add in column dividers, making it possible to export the data to a spreadsheet. I've used this feature to great success.

When you open a document image in Abbyy FineReader it should automatically try to determine the structure of any tabulated data which is not already delineated with borders. If the correct structure is not found, you can delete the auto-created areas, and click on 'Table' on the toolbar for the image pane (see the red cirle in the picture below). Draw a box around the area which contains the data you want to arrange in table form. If there are errors, clicking on the blue table will activate a pop up box (see the green circle in the picture below) which will allow you to insert horizontal and vertical lines where needed.

Shift select the thumbnails of the images you need to get text from, and then right click to read them and render the text. Then simply go to File . . . Save Document As . . . Microsoft Excel Workbook.