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Converting a physical PDF into an excel doc

  • 14-07-2010 10:45am
    #1
    maxwell smart
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,940 ✭✭✭


    The title may not be correct, here is what I want to do.

    I have a large amount of data on physical paper, which was from a .pdf file. I need to get this into a useable format. It is names of people who attended annual AGM's in a company, those who attended had a line drawn through their names, those who were eligible but did not attend have no line.
    My project is to contact all the people who did not attend and survey them as to why they did not. (not bothered is the answer, but someone is paying me to work this out so.....!).

    Can I scan these lists into a scanner and then convert them? I have a bit of a budget so if there is software for this I could buy it.

    Any help is much appreciated!!


Comments

  • #2
    TouchingVirus
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 8,584 ✭✭✭TouchingVirus


    You can try to use OCR technology from the scanner software to turn the scanned document into a word document or whatever, then copy & paste from this to an excel spreadsheet. Be forewarned, OCR isn't perfect and you will have to correct it :)


  • #3
    duffman85
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 339 ✭✭duffman85


    If you have the full version of MS Office(Professional or Ultimate) there is a tool called Microsoft Office Document Imaging which allows you to scan and run OCR on the scanned document. You can send it all to word or select each column of text and copy & paste into Excel.

    This works best on typed text as opposed to handwritten text.


  • #4
    ressem
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,426 ✭✭✭ressem


    Omnipage 17 is OK for this stuff. You can set up batch jobs for scanning / adjusting and saving straight to excel. You can get it for about 60 STG if you google for the web site coupons that they issue.

    It doesn't work so well on test that it considers fuzzy or light grey, so try to keep the contrast and scanning resolution high while scanning.

    However if the names are printed and struck through, you would probably be better off getting the original PDF loading/scanning that direct to excel, setting a column to contain a tickbox and running through each list just tapping the spacebar to select present or not.


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