How-to

Turn a photo of a paper sheet into rows in a spreadsheet

Take a picture, email it, and get a table with one row per person. No retyping.

Why bother?

A bakery leaves a clipboard on the counter so customers can sign up for updates. By the end of the week there are twenty-odd handwritten names, phone numbers and email addresses. To use them, someone has to type every line into a spreadsheet, which is slow and easy to get wrong. With InboxSift, you photograph the sheet, email the photo, and the list comes back as a table you can download or drop into Google Sheets.

The steps

1. 1

   Take the photo

   Lay the sheet flat and hold your phone directly above it so the lines look straight. Get the whole table in the frame, including the column headings, in good light without glare. A screenshot works too.

2. 2

   Keep it under about 4 MB

   Email attachments larger than roughly 4 MB can be rejected before InboxSift ever sees them, and you will not get an error message. On an iPhone, choose Medium when Mail asks for the image size. Otherwise, take a screenshot of the photo and send the screenshot instead.

3. 3

   Email it to InboxSift

   Send the photo as an attachment to anything@parse.inboxsift.io (the part before the @ can be anything). Send it from the email address you registered with, because InboxSift only accepts mail from known senders.

4. 4

   See it as a table, and check it

   Open your dashboard. The sheet appears as a table with one row per person.

   Always check it by hand. The messier the handwriting, the more likely the AI is to misread something, and InboxSift will not flag these mistakes for you. Compare every row against the paper, especially email addresses, phone numbers and unusual names, before you use the list.

5. 5

   Send it to Google Sheets

   Click Download table as CSV under the table. In Google Sheets choose File, then Import, then Upload, pick the file, and choose Replace current sheet or insert a new sheet. Each person lands on their own row. Fix any mistakes you found in the previous step before you start using the sheet.