How do I important the data from hundreds of documents into spreadsheets?

May 3, 2011 11:53 AM

How do I use OCR to scan a standard document into an excel spreadsheet?

I have hundreds of reports that have basic fields like, name, address, and columns of information - is there a program or process in which OCR can be used to scan, capture and import the data automatically from hundreds of sheets with the same basic layout into an excel spreadsheet?

posted by perpetualstroll to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Not a perfect solution, but I've had some luck (on a much smaller scale) scanning to Word (with the OCR software that comes with Office) and then copy/pasting into Excel. Excel has been pretty decent about figuring out the right layout based on the formatting in Word.

Obviously not an ideal solution, but it's a place to start, and I'm sure others will be along with better answers.
posted by chndrcks at 12:14 PM on May 3, 2011

Acrobat also has OCR and a "copy as table" function that sort of works. It would be a pain to do it with lots of files, however.
posted by ropeladder at 9:34 PM on May 3, 2011