Digital Scanners To The Rescue

Don't File It, Scan It!

We can scan it, of course. Digital scanners create space-saving electronic replicas of any document. The IRS accepts digital scans of receipts for tax purposes. And with the right software, information can be extracted from digital scans and saved in Microsoft Office and other useful formats.

The Neat Company specializes in just that kind of solution. Originally named NeatReceipt, the firm bundles digital scanners with its proprietary software that extracts data from scanned documents and turns it into meaningful digital reports. Business cards scanned with the Neat system, for instance, are automatically converted into Outlook contact records. Receipts are parsed into Excel worksheet cells, generating expense reports for tax purposes. Paper documents can be turned into editable, searchable text.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is at the heart of Neat’s solutions and other scanning technologies. Raw digital scans are simply images composed of pixels, not text characters. OCR recognizes the patterns of pixels that form characters and translates them into text that can be manipulated and edited.

Many scanners today tout their ability to create PDF files. But not all take the extra step of using OCR to create an invisible overlay of ASCII text, which makes the PDF searchable. A searchable PDF is one whose text you can search when you have the PDF file open. It's also useful to file search utilities that have the ability to search for words inside a file. Have you ever looked through a stack of paper documents, searching for one page that contained a specific word or phrase? For example, let's say you have a bunch of printed bank or credit card statements. It's tax time, and you're looking for a specific transaction. If you scan those documents into searchable PDFs, the search becomes almost trivial.

Popular Scanners and OCR Software

In addition to the Neat product line, the Fujitsu ScanSnap family of scanners all feature scan-to-PDF and OCR capabilities. Prices from $150 to $400, and the ScanSnap scanners come in a spectrum of forms from ultra-portable to high-speed office workhorse. My accountant uses a ScanSnap to create PDF copies of all my tax documents, instead of making paper copies that would need to be filed in a cabinet. The Kodak Scanmate i1120 scanner can scan a business card or a document up to 34 inches long. The WorldocScan 400 by PenPower is a mobile scanner that sells for under $120. Canon’s CanoScan $54.99 LiDE110 Color Image Scanner also makes searchable PDFs.

If you already have a scanner, you need only some software to make searchable PDFs. Scan2PDF (http://scan2pdf.org) is a German software package that works with home or commercial scanners, and even with digital cameras, to produce searchable PDF files. It runs under all versions of Windows. Scan2PDF is free to try for 30 days, and costs only $29 to register.

No OCR software is perfect. The layout, color, contrast, font style, and many other aspects of the source document affect the quality of your results. If the critical key word(s) on your scanned receipt are misspelled by OCR software, you may never find it in a search. Since the searchable text in a PDF file is invisible, you can’t even proofread it. That's why I often scan into a Word document, where the OCR'd text is visible and can be edited to clean up any errors.

Scanning paper documents to PDF or other digital formats is a great way to save space, preserve the document's readability, and make them more useful. Well-designed file-naming and folder systems are all the organization that most users will need for their digital scans.

Do you have something to say about digital scanners, optical character recognition, or searchable PDFs? Post your comment or question below...