Optical Character Recoginition

R

Ron

Hello all, I have hard copies of Excel data, I do not have a soft
copy. Is there a way to convert my paper (hard copies) to digital
format so I can edit the content in Excel? Thanks, Ron
 
D

Dave Peterson

Some scanners come with OCR software that will save the data to an excel file.

(I'd spend some quality time checking those OCR results, though.)

Some fax software will receive faxes as picture files (.jpg). And you may find
software that essentially acts as the OCR for those .jpg files.
 
G

Gord Dibben

I have an HP Scanjet with IRIS OCR and it does a great job of scanning to a
*.txt file which can be opened in Excel.


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP
 
G

Gord Dibben

And how does this help to get data from a hard copy into Excel?


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP
 
M

Michelle

Yes, I've used www.free-ocr.com with some considerable success in the past.

It's all free and really easy to use.

The next step depends on what the data looked like originally - it might
scan into strings of numbers seperated by spaces/multiple spaces or some
other character

You'll then have to do some find/replace stuff with it (I find word VERY
good for replacing stuff in complex strings), and replace all the spaces
with commas - finally save it as a text file, so that you can open it with
Excel.

LET ME ECHO WHAT DAVE PETERSON SAID THOUGH...
***(I'd spend some quality time checking those OCR results, though.)***
it will have errors in the data

Cheers

Michelle
 
R

Ron

Thanks everyone..... I now have a good idea of how to go about this
project. This site is awesome... Thanks, Ron
 
R

Rich Locus

Ron:
I have done similar tasks converting paper documents to electronic form.
Here are some ideas:

Scan the document with OCR and create a text file. The text file is usually
"not pretty". Once you do that, then you can write a VB Script (I use
Microsoft Scripting Host 5.6 that comes with Windows) to eliminate double
spaces, etc. OR.. just edit it manually.

If you can get the text file into tab-delimited format, then you can import
it into Excel.
It would be like this:

1234 TAB 1235 TAB 1236 TAB CRLF
1234 TAB 1235 TAB 1236 TAB CRLF
1234 TAB 1235 TAB 1236 TAB CRLF

Excel does well at importing tab delimited files.

It still is a messy job, usually not perfect, so you will need to do
cleanup. We all wish there was a "magic wand" for that function, but
unfortunately, unless the data is really clean and uniform on the paper
documents, it's a challenge.
 
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