Re: Scan into EXCEL

[Don Guillett <donaldb@281.COM>]

Thanks for the input. It was suggested to try the ocr software in xp home. Since
I had this old brother mfc7000fc multi function thingy sitting around gathering
dust (since I use a Zerox color laser), I decided to try it. I cannot get my xp
computer to recognize it and the Brother web site only told me to uninstall all
Brother stuff and let xp recognize it. The only thing that exercise did was
remove the driver for that printer which xp also did not have drivers for to
re-install. XP didn't recognize or install anything either automatically or
manually. "Sigh"

I guess I will go out and buy one of those $60-$80 scanners and try the xp
software before buying dedicated software.  Any other comments, by ANYONE, will
be more than welcome.

BTW. I also have Textbridge Pro 9.0 sitting on a shelf that I guess I could try
too.

Don Guillett
SalesAid Software
Granite Shoals, TX
donaldb@281.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gerry Dunne." <gdunne@IAFRICA.COM>
To: <EXCEL-G@PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM>
Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 1:41 PM
Subject: Re: Scan into EXCEL


> 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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