Excel analyzing a screenshot stops at 20%

Dear @Louis,

I hope you’re having a good day.

thank you for raising this issue and for providing clear details about your experience.

To better understand and verify your situation, I have reproduced the same steps in my current working environment, as well as in a separate test environment. In addition, I tested the behavior in Excel for the web and also asked several colleagues to validate it in their environments. The result is that we are currently seeing the same behavior across all these scenarios, the “Data from Picture” feature consistently gets stuck at around 20% while preparing the data and does not progress further, just as you described.

I have also investigated and attempted some of the commonly recommended troubleshooting steps for this type of issue, such as testing with different images, switching between clipboard and file-based input, restarting Excel, and validating the environment. At this time, these approaches do not appear to resolve the problem.

Because this issue is occurring across multiple users, environments, and even Excel for the web, it strongly suggests that this is not related to your local setup or configuration but is instead very likely a service-side issue or a temporary regression in the Data from Picture (OCR) feature itself. As this feature relies on a cloud-based processing service, interruptions or unexpected behavior in the backend processing pipeline can result in the analysis stopping at a certain percentage without completing.

At the moment, I have also checked the available service health and public information channels, and Microsoft has not yet officially acknowledged or published an incident related to this behavior. However, based on the consistency of reproduction, this appears to be a broader issue rather than an isolated case.

To help ensure that this issue is properly communicated to the responsible engineering teams and can be investigated as quickly as possible, I would recommend that you submit feedback directly through the product. In Excel, you can do this by going to: Help > Feedback > Report a problem

If you are part of an organization, you can also report this through your IT administrator, who may escalate it via Microsoft support channels. If you are an admin yourself, you can consider opening a support ticket through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center to bring this to Microsoft’s attention more formally.

Your admin can raise support ticket from Microsoft 365 Admin Center>Support>Help & Support. 

Submitting feedback and reports from multiple users is especially important in cases like this, as it helps Microsoft identify patterns and prioritize investigation and resolution.

As a temporary workaround, you may consider using alternative methods to extract data from images, such as using another OCR-based tool (such as OneNote, Google Docs, or other converters) to extract the data, then importing it into Excel

Please also note that this is a user-support community forum, and not an official Microsoft support channel. Therefore, I do not have direct access to internal systems or escalation capabilities to resolve this type of service-level issue. That said, I will also report this behavior in my own environment to further contribute to visibility.

Once again, thank you for bringing this up, your report is very valuable and may help others encountering the same issue. I will continue to monitor for updates and will share any new information here as soon as it becomes available.

If my response has helped you better understand the situation and guided you toward a possible next step, please consider marking it as the Accepted answer. Doing so will pin the thread to the top, making it easier for others to discover your question and benefit from the insights shared.

Warm regards, 

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Data from Picture in Excel relies on image quality, supported character sets, and certain platform requirements. When analysis hangs, verify and correct these areas:

1. Confirm system requirements
   • Use Excel for Microsoft 365 on Windows 11 or Windows 10 version 1903 or later.
   • Ensure Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime is installed, as Data from Picture in Excel for Windows requires it.
2. Check language/characters in the screenshot
   • Only these character sets are supported: English, Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.
   • If the screenshot contains other scripts or mixed unsupported characters, the analysis may fail. Try capturing only supported-language text.
3. Improve the screenshot quality
   • Re-take the screenshot so it includes only the table data to import.
   • Avoid angled or skewed images; capture the table head-on and in focus.
   • Crop out any extra UI, headings, or graphics before using Data > From Picture > Picture From Clipboard.
4. Try an image file instead of clipboard
   • Save the screenshot as a file, then in Excel use Data > From Picture > Picture From File and follow the prompts.
   • This can sometimes avoid clipboard-related issues.
5. Review and insert
   • After Excel finishes analyzing, use the Data from Picture dialog to correct any recognized values, then select Insert Data.

If the feature still stops at 20% after these checks, test with a simple sample image (small, clear table with supported characters) to see whether the issue is with the specific screenshot or with the environment.

References:

• Insert data from picture