Microsoft continues to improve core Windows applications. An innovative and particularly practical function is being tested for one of the system’s built-in utilities.
If Windows 11 has not seen any major changes this year, despite the arrival of the highly anticipated 24H2 version, several software integrated by default into the operating system have, however, received some great new features. The Sticky Notes application (Sticky Notes) has for example been completely modernized and gained a new graphical interface, Mobile Connected has been enriched with a function to extract the text from photos taken with your smartphone, and Photos now offers a magic eraser to automatically delete unwanted elements from pictures.
Another basic Windows application should also soon receive a particularly practical new function, the Screen Capture Tool. This small utility allows, as its name suggests, to take a capture (a “photograph”) of all or part of what is displayed on the screen. This is very useful for illustrating how software works, for showing a bug on a computer support forum or for recording part of a web page for example. The application is regularly improving, and already allows you to extract the text or scan the QR Codes present on the captures.
As spotted by the specialized site Windows Latest, a brand new function is currently being tested for the Screen Capture Tool: the ability to extract data tables in captures, to import them into another application , like Excel. According to Windows Latest, using this function would be as simple as it is effective. Just take a screenshot of a table, then click the button Text Actions. In addition to the functions Copy all text et Suppression rapide already existing, a new action named Copy as table will now be available.
After clicking on this button, simply copy and paste into the application of your choice, such as Excel, to insert the table extracted from the capture. And the result would be totally satisfactory, since according to the tests carried out by Windows Latest, the data would be perfectly copied, in table form and “without any error”. The site, however, has a reservation: to prevent unwanted data from being extracted and copied, the screenshot must only contain the table in question, and not the elements surrounding it, such as the interface of an application.
This new function is currently in the testing phase, within one of the development channels of the Windows Insider program. It is therefore not accessible to the general public at the moment, and you must install version 11.2409.22.0 of the Screen Capture Tool to take advantage of it. As this is a preview version currently being tested, it is obviously not recommended on a home or work computer. So be patient, the function will be automatically deployed to Windows 11 users once finalized, and will prove very practical in certain cases, in particular to instantly copy a table into a scanned document without having to make any manual entries!
