As the paperless office becomes the new “normal”, many small businesses now find themselves grappling with the manipulation of scanned content. For example, when a law firm or medical office converts to a digital platform for record-keeping, there is usually a need to access a scanned document and updated it at some point. This isn’t always necessary with medical charts, because EMRs convert charts into online forms, but there are many other scanned documents that will require some editing down the road.
One of the best solutions for the conversion of image files, or PDFs, into text-rich searchable documents is to use document scanning. It can be done in many languages, and allows law firms, archive facilities and museums to search, catalog, and manipulate the content of image files. Many offices use HTML programming language in OCR scanning because it allows for quick access and simple editing.
In addition to converting these scanned documents into searchable text, OCR scanning can also structure the data for conversion to Excel. Of course, the success of any Excel conversion through OCR will depend greatly upon the readability and structure of the existing pages. Document scanning that has already have tabulated data (using delimited tabs and spaces) usually generate the best result, while sheets with non-standard columns may need to be manually adjusted.
There are other ways to make the conversion from image file to Excel, such as Zonal Software, Adobe Acrobat, and Visual Basic, but these can be time consuming and more expensive than document scanning. A great way to determine which solution is best for your needs is to ask for a test or sample.