The Text Grab family has a new member: a browser extension. Copying structured data off a web page usually ends in a mangled mess. Rows collapse, columns smear together, and you spend more time cleaning up than you saved. The new Text Grab extension fixes that. Select a table or list right in your browser and it lands on your clipboard with its structure preserved, ready to paste as a real table.
The killer feature: grab exactly the table you want
Here’s the part I’m most excited about. Web pages rarely give you the clean table you actually want. There’s the giant table where you only need five rows, the pricing grid wedged between two ads, or the “table” that isn’t a table element at all, just a pile of divs in a CSS grid.
The extension lets you pick exactly what you want to copy. Draw a resizable region over the page and the extension grabs only the rows and columns your selection touches, merged cells (colspan and rowspan) and all. The shaded area tints precisely what will be captured, so there are no surprises. Prefer the whole thing? A little Copy table or Copy list button is pinned to every data table and list on the page, so one click grabs the entire structure without any dragging.
And when there’s no real table to be found, it still works. The extension recognizes repeating structures like lists, ARIA grids, and runs of similar cards, then turns each repeated block into a row. Failing that, it reconstructs a grid from the page layout itself, grouping text into rows and columns by position. The classic “this data is technically on the page but good luck copying it” problem, solved.
Paste straight into your spreadsheet of choice
This is where it all pays off. Whatever you grab goes onto your clipboard as both a clean HTML table and tab-separated text, so a single paste lands as a proper table in Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice Calc, Notion, your docs, or Text Grab’s own spreadsheet mode. Rows, columns, and merged cells come along for the ride. No reformatting, no manual column-splitting, no regret.
Three ways to grab
The extension gives you three selection modes, and it remembers the last one you used:
- Table is the structured-data grab described above: real tables, lists, and layout grids, copied as a spreadsheet-ready table.
- Direct Text copies the underlying text of whatever’s inside your region (no OCR needed), clipped neatly to the edges of your selection.
- Screenshot hands the region off to the Text Grab desktop app’s Grab Frame for OCR, which is perfect for image-only content.
It even handles PDFs
Browser PDFs are notoriously hard to copy from. Start a grab on a PDF and the extension re-opens it in its own built-in pdf.js viewer, where the text is real, selectable DOM. That means Table and Direct Text work exactly like they do on a web page, giving you perfectly accurate text and tables out of a PDF with no OCR guesswork. (Scanned, image-only PDFs have no text layer, so reach for Screenshot mode there.)
Works on its own, and even better with Text Grab
The extension is fully standalone, so you don’t need the desktop app to grab a table and paste it into your spreadsheet. But if you do have Text Grab installed, flip on the Send to Text Grab toggle and your grab opens in the desktop app for further refinement: the Edit Text window for text, spreadsheet mode for tables. You can also right-click any image to send it straight to Text Grab for OCR.
Your data never leaves your machine
This one matters to me, so it gets its own section. The Text Grab extension is local first, all the way down. When you grab a table, list, or block of text, that content goes from the page to your clipboard and nowhere else. There is no server in the middle, no account to sign into, and no analytics quietly phoning home with what you copied. The extension does exactly one job: copy text in the best possible format. That is it.
The same holds for OCR. When you hand a screenshot or an image off for text recognition, the extension passes it to the Text Grab desktop app, and Text Grab does the OCR 100% on your device. Your screenshots, your documents, and the text inside them never get uploaded anywhere. Even PDFs are read locally: the extension fetches the file the same way your browser already does and renders it right in your own browser, so nothing is shipped off to be processed.
Local first is simply better. It’s faster, it works offline, and it means your data stays yours. No cloud, no tracking, no fine print.
Get it free
The Text Grab browser extension is free and works on any Chromium browser, including Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Arc, and more, on any OS.
Happy Text Grabbing!
Joe
P.S. If you’re new here, Text Grab is my free Windows app for pulling text off your screen with OCR. The browser extension brings that same “just grab it” feeling to web pages and PDFs.