[Web Wednesday] Digitise your work with OCR – Part One

The term OCR probably sends a shiver down your spine – and you’re not quite sure why. The term usually pops up in places such as exams or driving tests – it stands for Optical Characters Recognition, and, simply put, it means teaching computers to recognise written characters.

Say, for example, you write a note that says “Pick up milk” – you can scan that note into your computer and run it through some OCR software, which will then spit out the same words, but digitised, in an email, Word document – whatever you want really.

There is no shortage of OCR software out there – entire industries have sprung up around taking companies records, digitising them and sending them back in .pdf form. As with all technical breakthroughs, this magical software has now filtered down to the consumer level – and several cheap or free services have launched alongside it.

At it’s most basic level, all you need to take advantage of OCR is a computer (which – as you are reading this – I’m going to assume you have), and a scanner or digital camera. The first stage is to scan or take pictures of your documents – these can be anything – invoices, letters, bank statements, or even previously printed documents that you want to re-digitise.

Once you’ve got all your digital copies, you need to run them through the OCR software. The most popular OCR software packages are Abbyy Finereader (£89) and Adobe Acrobat (~£300).  There are free solutions available – such as Microsoft Office Document Imaging – although they have minimal feature sets and are not very user-friendly.

Every OCR package is different, but at their most basic they will spit out plain text from the document you scanned, which you are then free to edit as you please.  This can be incredibly useful for lengthy documents that you might want to search through in the future such as contracts, terms and conditions or account statements.

So what are you waiting for?  Get scanning to backup and digitise your entire filing cabinet for easier storage, tagging and searching.

In part two we will explore OCR services, which can take the paperwork – and hassle – out of your hands entirely.