Short answer: macOS Live Text can read the words in a table but throws away the columns — you get a text blob. Lovely Screenshots has a Grab Table mode that OCRs the table and rebuilds its rows and columns, so ⌘V drops real cells into Excel or a formatted table into Word. On-device, free.
Why copying tables from images is normally painful
Tables live everywhere you can't select them: PDFs, dashboards, slides, scanned documents, photos of whiteboards. macOS Live Text and most OCR tools read the characters but return them as flat lines of text — paste that into Excel and entire rows land in one cell. You end up retyping, which defeats the point.
The fix: Grab Table in Lovely Screenshots
Lovely Screenshots (free, macOS 14+) includes a table-aware capture mode. It recognizes the text with its positions, clusters those positions into rows and columns, then puts two things on your clipboard at once: tab-separated values for spreadsheets and an HTML table for word processors.
- Start a table grab. Click the Lovely menu-bar icon and choose Grab Table… (or press ⌘⇧5 and pick Table in the command bar). Your cursor becomes a crosshair.
- Select the table on screen. Drag a box around the table — in a PDF, a web page, a slide, a photo of a whiteboard, anywhere. Lovely OCRs the region and reconstructs the rows and columns from the text's geometry.
- Paste into Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets. Switch to your spreadsheet and press ⌘V. The data lands in individual cells — real rows and columns, not one blob of text. Empty cells stay empty.
- Or paste into Word, Mail or Docs. The same clipboard also carries an HTML table, so pasting into Word, Apple Mail, Google Docs or Notion produces a formatted table automatically.
Frequently asked questions
Can macOS Live Text copy a table from a screenshot?
Live Text copies the words, but it flattens everything into plain lines — the column structure is lost, so pasting into Excel puts whole rows into single cells. Lovely's Grab Table keeps the geometry: it clusters the recognized text into rows and columns and writes both spreadsheet-ready TSV and a formatted HTML table to the clipboard.
How accurate is it?
Very good on clean tables (app UIs, PDFs, web pages) — each empty cell is even re-scanned individually at higher magnification to catch lone digits that OCR usually drops. Low-resolution photos or hand-drawn tables reduce accuracy; you'll paste and fix a cell or two rather than retype everything.
Is Grab Table free?
Yes — Grab Table ships in the free version of Lovely Screenshots. All recognition runs on your Mac with Apple's Vision framework; nothing is uploaded anywhere.
Does it work with Numbers and Google Sheets?
Yes. The clipboard carries tab-separated values, which every spreadsheet app understands — Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets, LibreOffice. Word-processor apps pick up the HTML table variant instead.