ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 20 -- United States Patent no. 12,393,775, issued on Aug. 19, was assigned to Altair Engineering Inc. (Troy, Mich.).
"Automatic data extraction" was invented by Samuel Allen Hudock (Greensboro, N.C.), Maashes User Phillips (Greensboro, N.C.) and Austin Alexander Spears (Greensboro, N.C.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Described are methods for automatically extracting data from structured documents e.g. spreadsheets, regardless of the manner in which data is organized, and using the extracted data to generate an output table that is in a standardized format. The method can include the operations for automatically extracting data from a spreadsheet that defines rows and co...