Tablora · Library
Review orientation before transcribing a table
A sideways or tilted page invites missed headers and rows read in the wrong order. Fix the view of the source first, then check the table.
What goes wrong with a sideways page
Wide tables are often printed in landscape, and phone photos of them come out sideways or tilted. A page at an angle makes it easy to lose the header row, to read a column as a row, or to drift from one line to the next across a long row. The cells you end up with can look tidy while belonging to the wrong records.
Orientation is a property of the page, not of the data. Once a table is text, there is nothing left to rotate: a CSV has no page geometry, and turning its rows into columns is a different operation that does not fix a misread capture.
Before you capture or read
- Turn the paper or the PDF view so the header reads normally from left to right.
- Shoot the page straight, flat and well lit; the Tablora app shows the same advice when it finds no table on a page.
- For paper, Scan is usually steadier than a hand-held photo.
- For a PDF, read the original file rather than a screenshot or a photo of a screen.
- If the first result is poor, retake the capture and use Read again rather than correcting dozens of cells.
Checking the result against the page
- Compare the header row with the source, cell by cell.
- Pick an identifier and an amount near opposite corners of the table and find both in the source; if either is in the wrong row, the reading order is off.
- Use the Source · page view above the table in the app to compare the region it read with the grid.
- Look at cells marked in amber as ones to check; they are often where a tilted line crossed into the next row.
- Count rows and columns in the source against the rows × columns count shown for the table.
What the browser tools can check
The browser inspector, normalizer and other tools on this site work only with text you paste. They do not read photos, rotate images or run OCR. If you paste cells from a capture, the inspector can still tell you whether every row has the same width, and that is useful: a row that was read across two lines of a tilted page often has more or fewer fields than the header.
A clean parse, however, says nothing about whether the right values ended up in each row. Only a comparison with the page does.
Correcting a few cells
If only some cells are wrong, tap each one in the app, type the value you see on the page and press Save. Use Delete row for a row that was read twice.