Re: Scan into EXCEL

["Gerry Dunne." <gdunne@IAFRICA.COM>]

Hi Don,

We do a large amount of scanning into excel at work, generally from very
poor quality source documents eg bad photocopies.

We've tried many, many brands of software, including all the big name stuff,
and most of it is very poor with excel. The character recognition can be
very good, but the ability of the software to get the data into the correct
cells is usually not good.

A couple of people have mentioned ABBYY software, which is Russian
developed. It works very well, though its not necessarily cheap.

However, ABBYY sell or license the recognition engine to others.

If price is very important, you could try Presto OCR 3 (by Newsoft I think),
which uses an early version of the ABBYY engine. It's about $30. Presto OCR
4 is also available for about $100. If you are interested mainly in data
capture, and not pretty formatting, Presto OCR 3 will be fine. It has good
tools for working with tables.

Since you can do data capture with black and white scanning at 300 dpi, you
don't need a very high quality scanner. It should be twain compliant for
Presto / ABBYY, but I think they all are these days.

At work, we scan using a digital photocopier with a document feeder linked
to the network, which is very fast. This setup replaced an expensive HP
scanner with an automatic document feeder which was very troublesome.

Use Google to find Presto and ABBYY - I don't have urls here unfortunately.

Hope this helps.


Gerry

----- Original Message -----
From: "Don Guillett" <donaldb@281.COM>
To: <EXCEL-G@PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM>
Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2003 3:30 PM
Subject: Scan into EXCEL


> I am seeking advice as to the least expensive scanner/ ocr software that
will be
> easy to scan tables, etc into Excel.
> All comments appreciated.
>
> Also posting msnews.misc
>
> Don Guillett
> SalesAid Software
> Granite Shoals, TX
> donaldb@281.com
>
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