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KevinBeach's avatar
KevinBeach
Copper Contributor
Oct 12, 2026

CoPilot's OCR interfering with its functioning

I've asked CoPilot to create a research database in an .xlsx file, by extracting data from .pdf files that I have uploaded.

It's working very hard and willingly, but is being frustrated because its OCR mechanism is grabbing and rendering the files before CoPilot can see the raw data.

Feature Request: Give Copilot Access to Original Uploaded Files, Not Just OCR/Rendered Representations While building a research-grade numismatic catalogue from PDFs and an Excel workbook, Copilot was able to read OCR text and rendered pages but could not work directly with the underlying XLSX workbook or original PDFs. For research, legal, archival, genealogical, accounting and catalogue-building tasks, Copilot should have access to: Original uploaded file. Rendered page/image representation. OCR/extracted text. The AI should be able to choose the most appropriate representation for the task rather than relying primarily on OCR.

2 Replies

  • SK_19's avatar
    SK_19
    Copper Contributor

    Direct PDF parsing (text, tables, metadata) alongside page rasterization fallback

    Multi-representation routing — raw bytes for XLSX, text for structured PDFs, OCR only when needed

    Research-grade schema in Excel with provenance columns (source file, page, extraction method)

    Validation pass to flag low-confidence rows for your review

    Reusable for future numismatic PDFs you add to the folder

    • KevinBeach's avatar
      KevinBeach
      Copper Contributor

      I'm sorry, but I don't understand any of your answer.