murashid wrote:
Hi,
I am wondering if you guys may be aware of a hardware or a software
product that can provide me the capability to put scanned table data
in
a spread sheet format. For example, I make a Xerox copy of a data table
from a book and now I scan it with a scanner. Now an option for me to
manually enter that data numbers into spread sheet. So, my question to
you is if you may have a software that can actually save me the manual
typing of that data into a spread sheet format. Please let me know; any
help is appreciated. Thanks in advance !!! Please email me at
, if you may have any hints.
Thanks.
Musharaf
There are various products. I happen to use Abbyy FineReader. Your scanner
just creates a JPG or BMP or whatever it can. Then Abbyy reads in the image
file and does the OCR conversion to text. Along the way it can also figure out
the grid structure of a table and place each grid element into it's own cell.
Then when I'm done it exports the output directly to Excel.
Ideally it all works perfectly, and indeed it often does. Sometimes I have to
do a bit of editing on the spread sheet to clean up any OCR errors. It depends
on the quality of the original image. Small type newspaper tables take more
work than crisply printed tables on higher quality book paper.
Last time I checked you could download FineReader and use it free for a week or
some such to try it out. Personally I bought a down level 6.0 version on eBay
for maybe $25 rather than buying the current 7.0 for full price. Having used it
for six months or so I'm now considering upgrading to the full version anyhow.
Good luck...
Bill