Microsoft Excel is an excellent tool. It allows you to store, organize and process large amounts of data in one single file. If you use it well, a single excel file can help you improve your team’s efficiency and your company’s revenue without anything slipping through the cracks. But MS Excel files also come with a large workload. Keeping them neat and effective requires technical knowledge and someone or a team to constantly feed data into the cells, organize it, and extract it for its use.
The good thing is that plenty of tools nowadays can help you automate this crucial but tedious task of feeding clean data to cells that can be used to make the right decisions toward your company’s goals. A parsing software can help you do that and more.
Below we’ll explain exactly how to extract text from excel and how you can use that to grow your business.
Benefits of automating excel data extraction
Cost Saving
Automatic excel data extraction will save you money by reducing manual labor from your employees. You’ll be able to redirect their valuable time and attention to more critical tasks that cannot be automated, like customer interactions. On top of that, data extraction will be faster, a task that would take hours to any team to complete, a parsing software can finish in just a few seconds.
Reduce errors
By automating your data extraction into an excel table or any other format of your liking, you’ll be able to reduce the possibility of human error. You’ll have cleaner and more reliable data to make informed decisions and to present to customers and stakeholders.
Present your achievements
If your excel files are your go-to source of information for your business, you’ll need to automatically extract the necessary data to present to clients and stakeholders. Let’s say your stakeholders want regular updates on how the company is going, which is an excellent thing to have handy as it helps you and your team stay focused on the goal. But manually doing that task is very time-consuming. By automating the extraction of the data you need to have available at all times, you guarantee timely delivery of this crucial information and skip the need to use valuable work hours to accomplish it.
Scale your business
As your data volume grows, it becomes unmanageable to continue to extract it manually. That’s why automated extraction makes your business more scalable. As it grows and you receive more and more inquiries via email or establish additional sources for your data. All you need to do is tweak your parser to adapt to the increasing data and different sources. There’s no need to go to your IT team or hire more employees to help with the extraction, as your parsing tool will take the additional workload without skipping a beat.
Features of a suitable extractor
There are many parsing software out there, and you’ll need to determine which one will work best for your team and your company. First, consider what you’ll need from parsing software and have that top of mind when searching for the right one. In general, we recommend that the parsing software you choose has the following features:
Structured data extraction from any document format
Unstructured or semi-structured data comes in many different formats. To handle faster and more efficient data extraction, it’s crucial that the parsing software you choose accepts common unstructured document formats like DOCX, PDF, or TXT. That way, your business can use all the data you receive regardless of its format.
Clean data extraction ready for advanced processing
If after your parsing software extracts the data your business needs, your team has to clean it; this is not the right software for you. The data extraction software has to be able to clean the data automatically. A typical example is the negative quantity values derived from invoices. The software must be able to recognize and remove them, so your team can start working with clean data from the get-go. Your parsing software should bring more value by providing clean data thanks to enhanced processing.
Seamless integration with widely used apps
Your team should be able to export the extracted data in several formats, such as XML or JSON, to other widely used programs like SAP, SQL Server, Oracle, or Tableau. This is especially important as your business can get helpful information more quickly, make informed decisions and save valuable resources.
User-Friendly Interface
There’s no point in getting new software if it’s too complicated for your team to use. Software for data extraction should have an easy-to-use interface that is also capable of managing digital document workflows. Your team should be able to take full advantage of the parsing software after only a short onboarding. Other teams beyond IT use the parsing software, that’s why it shouldn’t demand a high level of technical expertise to handle data.
Is it possible to extract text without a code?
Absolutely! The beauty of technology is that as it evolves, it becomes more inclusive. Nowadays, parsing software like Parserr makes it easy to extract text without code, even from complicated sources like PDF documents.
Suppose you decide to use Parserr as your preferred parsing software. In that case, you’ll only need to set a few rules to help the software detect the attachments to extract the information and find the data to extract and organize. The process is simple to follow, and the tool will learn from actual examples from your business to reduce the possibility of mistakes.
How do you extract names from excel?
Suppose you, like many of our customers, receive emails with excel email attachments in the form of bank account data, reports, invoices, leads and many other document types. In that case, you can use Parserr to extract names from those files.
You will need to create a free Parserr account and set up some rules that will allow you to extract any text string from an excel cell. The section below explains more about how the rules work to extract information from email attachments.
Now, if you want to extract names from MS Excel or Google sheets, so the information looks cleaner in your file, you can use an excel formula for that purpose.
Let’s say that you have both first name and last name (in that order) in cell A1 and you want to separate them into two individual cells, say cell A2 and cell A4. You can start by using the left function to extract the first name into cell A2 and the right function to extract the last name into cell A4. This way, you’ll leave cell A3 for middle names.
If instead of having a first name and last name in a cell, what you have is an email address that contains the details, for example, john.smith@parserr.com, then you will use the left function and the mid function to extract the details you need. If we follow the example, the left function will help you extract the first name, and the mid function will help you extract the last name from the email address.
Extracting text from excel can be very simple if you know the correct formulas. For more details about extracting excel text using formulas, check out this how-to guide from Brown University.
How can you extract phone numbers from pdf, text, and excel files
You can use formulas to extract any number or special character from excel. But to easily extract names and numbers from PDF and text files, you’ll need a parsing tool like Parserr.
Step 1: Create your Parserr account and inbox
This inbox will receive all the emails with the information you want to parse.
Step 2: Set some parsing rules
For that, we’ll need you to send your first email to your Parserr inbox. Once we get it, we’ll ask you a few questions to establish the proper rules for parsing your emails. Our tool leverages the jQueryBuilder framework to help you easily navigate Parserr’s intelligent user interface. You can add as many rules as you need, group different rules together, and choose from 10 other operators to filter the duplicate rows you need from your CSV/Excel spreadsheets.
In this step, you’ll need to select the rows or columns that contain the specific text you want to extract from the excel file and determine how you want this information organized.
Excel tip: Stick to one cell per piece of information. This way, you’ll keep everything perfectly sorted and easy to find through the search function.
However, some customers prefer to extract data into a CSV file or directly into their CRM using our Dynamic CRM integration by using Parserr. That way all their leads go directly into the platform that sales and marketing will use to reach out.
Step 3: Review the rules you’ve set and add, remove or modify as needed
The good news is that you can always change the parsing rules to adapt to your needs. The process is very user-friendly. We recommend that once the rules are established, you send several test emails to ensure everything is working correctly before letting the software process more significant amounts of data.
And that’s it! Getting the clean extracted text you need from any Excel row or column became much more straightforward.
However, we still have a team of experts who will assist you if you need help at any point in the process.
Wrapping Up
Automating text extractions from Excel has never been so easy. Take advantage of Parserr to increase your team’s efficiency, saving hours of manual work. You and your team will gain back time and attention to take care of your customers and grow your company’s revenue.
We can streamline your data extraction from Excel by setting just a few simple rules. Contact us to discuss your parsing needs to improve your processes and grow your revenue.
