Imagine you need to extract tables from invoices and other documents in your business workflow. Manually retyping or even copy-pasting the values from documents can be exhausting and require a life-threatening quantity of caffeine to complete. Our Magic Grid feature can significantly boost your performance – and dramatically reduce your coffee consumption – when working with such table structures. Let’s take you through it.

Opening Magic Grid

The Magic Grid feature can be used on fields that contain table-like data. Clicking on the blue button at the bottom right of the document will take you to the Magic Grid mode.

Creating a Magic Grid

When you click on the blue button, you will see the grid as suggested by the Rossum engine. You can either adjust it by clicking and dragging the boundary of the grid to the correct extent or create a new grid from scratch. Additionally, Rossum will try to put row and column lines where necessary.

Adding row and column separators

If the automatic adding of row and column lines didn’t do the job 100% correctly, you can:

• Move the existing lines by clicking and dragging them
• Add a new row line on the left ruler or column line on the top ruler
• Delete a row/column line at the same places where lines are created

Assigning labels

Once the grid is correctly aligned to the data on the invoice, you should select the available label of the column. Such a label allows you to match the data to the field defined in the extraction schema. Moreover, labeling the data correctly enables Rossum to extract with greater precision over time if you use the Dedicated AI Engine.

Disabling rows

Occasionally, you may want to disable data extraction for a specific row. You can do this easily by clicking the cross icon to the right of the target row.

Moving / deleting a table

You can move the grid simply by dragging it. To delete the whole grid, click on the more options icon , located in the top-left corner of the grid, and choose the “Delete grid” option. Keep in mind that actions on a single grid do not affect grids on other pages. If you change one, you still have to update the others if necessary.

Extracting data

Finally, you can click the “Read data from table” button, which will read the data to the table in the validation screen. With just a few clicks you can extract tens or hundreds of items in a few seconds.

Long documents with big tables

Do you need to capture data from long documents with big tables? We summed up some useful tips on how to use Magic Grid to process such tables easily and efficiently in a separate article.

Capturing nested values inside other columns 

If capturing data with Magic Grid is not enough and your documents tend to be more complex, read about how to capture nested values in columns of the table. 

See the bright future

Using a Magic Grid not only lets you extract table data quickly. It also gives Rossum the opportunity to learn to capture data more accurately from the nicely and correctly highlighted data.

Discover Rossum’s unique learning capabilities.

When you have enabled Rossum’s Dedicated AI Engine, using the Magic Grid will boost automatic extraction of table data . It is a beautiful example of symbiosis between the work of the Rossum team and the tough work of our users.