6 Methods to Scan Business Cards to Excel (Free Included)

When attending business parties or other formal occasions, people usually exchange their business cards to get to know each other quickly. These business cards typically bear basic information about the givers, including their name, company, contact information, etc. But as time goes by, you have stored a stack of business cards in hand. It becomes a tricky problem to find someone’s contact among them, and you may even have lost several cards by mistake.

Therefore, to manage business cards in a more efficient and organized way, we are increasingly preferring to scan them in digital format and export all the contact database in Excel spreadsheet. In this article, we will introduce the best apps and free apps to scan business card to excel with ease, also demonstrate how to scan your cards into Excel with online free tools.

 Cisdem PDF Converter OCR

Best Business Cards Scanner to Excel on Windows and Mac

• Convert image scans to Excel, Word, Powerpoint, and so on.
• Convert native and scanned PDFs to more than 15 formats.
• Support OCR technology in 17 languages.
• Batch scan business cards to excel at once.
• Perform fast conversion with highly accurate OCR result.
• User-friendly interface and easy to use.

Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7 Free Download macOS 10.13 or later

How to Choose the Best Business Card Scanner to Excel?

There are various factors that should be considered into choosing an optimal app to scan business cards to excel. It may be up to your budget, frequency of scanning, OCR accuracy and so on. Here’s some criteria I used when I was testing a list of business card scanners to excel on the market.

1. Price: Most people looked for free options to scan business cards to excel initially, but few can achieve satisfactory results. Eventually, they have to turn to paid products. But the prices vary widely among different applications. It is best to choose one that offers a free trial period, so you can give it a shot to decide whether it is worth the cost.
2. OCR accuracy: In the process of scanning paper business cards to digital Excel file, OCR is required, which is applied to recognize texts from image-based/scanned files. Therefore, it is essential to make sure that the OCR result of software is accurate, for instance, check whether or not the name, contact details, address and other important information are extracted by the program correctly.
3. Conversion speed: In daily work, efficiency is often the top priority. Imagine you’re scanning a business card into an Excel file, how annoying it would be if it took you lots of time and effort and even caused delays to your other work. Therefore, you need a relatively lightweight tool that can run the program quickly and perform tasks very smoothly.
4. Ease of use: A good business card scanner to Excel should also simplify your workflow, with an easy-to-use and organized interface, so you have no need to spend lots of time familiarizing yourself with the software.

Best App to Scan Business Cards to Excel on Windows and Mac

Basing on the criteria mentioned above, here we pick the best app to scan business cards to excel on Mac, Windows and even on your mobile devices.

#1 Cisdem PDF Converter OCR

It is a Windows and macOS OCR converter to turn native PDF and image-based files into editable formats, including Excel spreadsheet. It can recognize texts from one or multiple business cards at one time, then save the information in Word, PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, Text and other editable formats. No matter what language the business cards use, Cisdem PDF Converter OCR can accurately read it.

With its advanced OCR feature, you can export part of the business card as Table, while other parts as Text or Image.

How to Scan Business Cards to Excel on Windows or Mac?

1. Take pictures of the business cards with the camera on your phone or desktop, save the photos on your device.
2. Download and install Cisdem PDF Converter OCR.
   Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7 Free Download macOS 10.13 or later
3. Start it and go to the Converter tab.
4. Import business cards images to the interface by drag and drop, and select to XLSX from the output menu list.
5. Click on the gear icon to adjust output settings, you can decide whether to combine all pages into a single Excel sheet.
6. Once finished, click OK. Choose your output folder and click Convert.

#2 ABBYY FineReader PDF 

Talking about OCR solution, ABBYY FineReader leads in this field. In fact, it offers business card reader to scan and OCR business cards into your contacts, however it doesn’t support scan to excel format, we will need its desktop product ABBYY FineReader PDF to scan your business cards to Excel.

ABBYY FineReader PDF for Windows or Mac is more than a PDF editor, it helps to scan and OCR business cards to MS office or other formats too. It can import scans from a scanner, then perform OCR on the file, you will be able to edit the scanned file, export as Excel or other formats.

How to Scan Business Cards to Excel on Windows or Mac?

1. Download and install ABBYY FineReader on your computer.
2. Launch the program, go to Scan > Microsoft Excel. 
3. Import business cards images into the program from your device, or the scanner that connected to your device. 
4. Choose keep formatted text or plain text, select OCR language, and adjust other settings.
5. Once finished, click Convert to Excel to start process.

Free App to Scan Business Cards to Excel

We’ve studied on dozens of apps designed to scan business cards, it is pitiful that most of them allow exporting as csv only and require a payment. If you are still looking for free apps to scan business cards to Excel, we have 2 options, but both of them require extra steps to save your business cards in Excel.

#1 OneNote

Microsoft OneNote is a note taking app for free, working on Android, iOS, Windows and macOS devices. Its built-in OneNote OCR feature allows scanning files, copying texts from images. It doesn’t support exporting recognized files as Excel, but you can copy and paste the business card information to a Excel spreadsheet.

Disadvantages:

• Cannot batch scan and convert.
• Cannot export business cards as Excel directly.

Scan Business Cards to Excel Free with OneNote

1. Download and install Microsoft OneNote onto your desktop or mobile device, the steps will be similar on different versions.
2. Open a recent note or create a new note. 
3. Go to Insert > Pictures/Camera to import the business card. 
4. Once the business card is imported, click on the image and choose Copy Text.
5. Then open a Excel document, paste the business card data into it.

#2 Evernote

Evernote is another note-taking app with OCR feature, available on Windows, Mac, Android and iOS. It cannot export business card as Excel, but it can scan your cards accurately and import them to your contacts with fields correctly filled, the name, email address, telephone number will be in right position.

Disadvantages:

• Cannot batch scan and export.
• Cannot export business card as Excel format directly.

Scan Business Cards to Excel Free with Evernote

1. Download and install Evernote on your device.
2. Tap on the Camera icon to take a photo of the business card.
3. Once the business card is imported, check the details, save the scans as business card for contact import or copy and paste to a Excel file.

Scan Business Cards to Excel Online Free

Still, we can scan business cards to excel without installing any app, just by using an online free OCR tool, like Google Drive and OnlineOCR. 

#1 Google Drive

Google Drive is a free platform to store and manage files online, it offers a set of tools to process files online, Google Docs is one of the tools. Google Docs is OCR featured, allowing users to export scanned PDF or image as editable formats. Though not supporting export business card scans directly as Excel, you can copy and paste the text to an Excel file.

Disadvantages:

• It takes lots of time to import the data into Excel.
• The formatting may be disordered.
• You can only open one image/file at once.

How to Scan Business Cards to Excel Online Free?

1. Take pictures of business cards and save the images.
2. Log in to Google account and go to Google Drive.
3. Click New > File Upload, import the business card images.
4. Right click on the business card image and open with Google Docs.
5. Then go to File > Download as, choose an output format or directly copy and paste the text from your business card to an Excel file.

#2 OnlineOCR

It is an online free OCR converter to export scanned PDF and images in JPG, BMP, TIFF, GIF as Text, Word or Excel format. It doesn’t support batch scan and convert. But you can preview the OCR result before downloading the output file.

Disadvantages:

• Max file size you can import is 15mb.
• You can only scan business card to excel one by one.

How to Scan Business Cards to Excel Online Free?

1. Take pictures of the business cards and save the images.
2. Go to onlineocr.net.
3. Click Select file... to import a business card image.
4. Choose the file language.
5. Choose the output format as Microsoft Excel.
6. Click Convert to scan business card to Excel.

Compare 6 Business Card Scanners to Excel

Conclusion

To scan business cards to Excel, we recommend using a desktop app on Mac or Windows, large screens will be more convenient to manipulate the data in an Excel file. Also, we should take notice that there is few mobile app designed to scan our business cards to Excel, so check carefully before paying for an app to do the job.