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Bob Bob is offline
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Default Scanning documents

II would like to be able to scan forms into Excel or Word and then fill in
the forms for different people.Im trying to get away from the typewriter.
Thanks for any help
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Jay Freedman Jay Freedman is offline
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Default Scanning documents

A scanner captures a picture of the page. Although you can embed that
picture in Word, you won't be able to type in it.

That gap is filled by software called Optical Character Recognition,
or OCR. This software looks at the image in the picture and tries to
"read" it character by character. The result is placed in a Word
document. Some programs are better at this than others.

Most scanners include a simple OCR program in their software bundle,
more as an advertisement for their separately priced (usually
expensive) software than as something that's really useful. The big
names in OCR software are Abbyy FineReader (www.abbyy.com) and Nuance
(formerly ScanSoft) OmniPage (www.nuance.com). Recent versions of MS
Office include the Microsoft Office Document Imaging program.

Most OCR programs are not well adapted for dealing with forms -- the
lines and boxes get in the way of interpreting the text. Nuance sells
OmniForm, which is supposed to be better tuned for this. Unless you
have an office where you scan dozens or hundreds of forms every day,
though, it's likely to be too expensive.

When you take into account the effort needed to scan, recognize,
correct, fill in, and save most forms, it's usually more effective to
reconstruct the form from scratch instead.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org

On Fri, 29 Dec 2006 16:36:00 -0800, Bob
wrote:

II would like to be able to scan forms into Excel or Word and then fill in
the forms for different people.Im trying to get away from the typewriter.
Thanks for any help

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JoAnn Paules [MVP] JoAnn Paules [MVP] is offline
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Default Scanning documents

It's going to take time and a lot of work. Is it worth your time and effort?
If so, there are some great sites that can help. But it'll take hours of
work per form.

--

JoAnn Paules
MVP Microsoft [Publisher]

~~~~~
How to ask a question
http://support.microsoft.com/KB/555375




"Bob" wrote in message
...
II would like to be able to scan forms into Excel or Word and then fill in
the forms for different people.Im trying to get away from the typewriter.
Thanks for any help



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Yacbo Yacbo is offline
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Default Scanning documents

I had this issue to deal with once and found that working backward produced
the most economic solution. As it turned out, the company that supplied the
"form" had created it with Excel and was just as willing to e-mail the form
to me with its original .xls extension as the previous .pdf rendering!
Viola-- no fancy character reading necessary. Worth a try.

--
Y


"Bob" wrote:

II would like to be able to scan forms into Excel or Word and then fill in
the forms for different people.Im trying to get away from the typewriter.
Thanks for any help

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Ron P Ron P is offline
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Default Scanning documents

"Bob" wrote in message
...
II would like to be able to scan forms into Excel or Word and then fill in
the forms for different people.Im trying to get away from the typewriter.
Thanks for any help


If you don't have an OCR program, a very "cludgy" work around is to place
text boxes where you want to fill in information on the picture of the form
that you are using.

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