How to get the data out of a spreadsheet that only appears on screen
Ask Vizard Agent to look for the spreadsheet's own address in the frame before it reads a single cell. A share link, a file path or a sheet identifier is very often visible in the browser bar or the title row, and fetching the real file gives you exact values instead of numbers recovered from compressed pixels.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Ask Vizard Agent to hunt for the source before it starts transcribing. It is one extra sentence in the brief, and it can replace the whole reading job with a single download that returns exact values. Say whether you want a document, a sheet or both, because that changes how the content is structured.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
It treats a table on screen as a picture of data, not the data itself. Reading small digits back through video compression risks a misread character, which is worse than no figure at all. So it looks for the file the pixels came from, and reads pixels only when it must. In the session behind this article it:
- Sampled the video's frames, pulled clearer ones and read the main scenes at higher resolution.
- Cropped the table region and read it column by column, because a whole screenful at once produces mush.
- Read the sheet's address where it appeared on screen, then zoomed in on the link to identify it exactly.
- Checked whether the original file could be downloaded directly and fetched the data from that source.
- Checked whether the narration belonged in the document, since figures without the explanation that ran over them are hard to interpret later.
- Built the document and the spreadsheet from the recovered content.
When does this not work well?
Recovery from pixels has a hard floor. Small figures, heavy compression, a table that scrolls quickly, or a screen filmed on a phone rather than recorded will each produce values that look plausible and are not. Vizard Agent has to flag those rather than fix them, and with no visible source the pixels are all there is.
Common questions
Why look for a link first? Because the real file gives exact values. Vizard Agent tries that before reading pixels.
What if the sheet is private? Then Vizard Agent falls back to reading the screen and says which figures are uncertain.
Does it include the narration? If you ask. Vizard Agent adds it, because it usually explains what the table means.