OmniPage Products Can Boost Your Productivity
In this text, we will provide a brief overview of OCR technology and its numerous applications. Then, we will go over how Kofax’s OmniPage family of products can boost your productivity by helping you tackle a major and ever-present issue affecting virtually all branches of business – paperwork.
What Is OCR Technology?
Before we go any further, we need to cover the basics. And the first step is the term itself. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition.
It is the process which begins with the identification and recognition of text in various types of images. The source of the image can be a scanned paper document, a PDF file, or a digital photo. Then, OCR technology converts this data into text the user can immediately and easily work on.
It would be natural to assume that this is a modern invention, a product of the digital age. However, we can actually trace early precursors of present-day OCR technology to as far back as the 19th century. Still, this technology couldn’t even approach its full potential until the height of the computer era, as you would expect.
Regarding the application of OCR, this technology has seen many uses. Still, by far the most well-known is the conversion of paper documents into a machine-encoded format. This is by far the quickest way of digitizing physical documents.
This process is crucial in the business application of OCR, which we will get to very soon. But, it has also seen other uses which are less financially driven, like the digitization of historical texts, records, or newspapers. This has resulted in those documents becoming much easier to access and search through, providing a valuable service to the public good.
In addition, OCR frequently works behind the scenes in many systems we use on a routine basis, like data entry. Or to list another example, the US Post Office employs it to speed up mail sorting. Finally, among its many other applications, it has also found a use in the technology which assists visually impaired persons.
OmniPage and Productivity
Now that we’ve seen what OCR is and its general applications, it should start to become clear how this technology can affect productivity on an everyday level, both for individual users and businesses. We already mentioned that the digitization of paper documents is essential in this regard so we will start there.
Imagine you receive a hard copy of a contract and your task is to create a digital version for further use. You can use a scanner but this won’t solve your primary issue. You will get images, not text documents. Other than for archival purposes, those files are next to useless as you can’t interact with the embedded text in any way. You can’t copy or edit it. If you plan to work on the text some more or simply want to search for specific passages, you’ll be back to square one.
And under normal circumstances, this would mean only one thing – that it was time for retyping. Now, some contracts are a couple of pages long. It won’t be a fun job but you can manage. However, this is far from the rule. Contracts with dozens of pages are nothing out of the ordinary and they can even enter triple digits if they have numerous attachments. Now, just consider how much time you would spend on typing out a 50-page document, for example. And if this is a regular occurrence, typing becomes a full-time job.
Fortunately, it does not have to be this way. Kofax’s OmniPage software provides a quick and easy solution to this problem with its OCR technology. Just load the scanned images into the program and you can have a Word document ready in minutes. This way, you can begin the real work immediately instead of wasting hours, if not days, on a task as repetitive and mundane as retyping.
But the benefits of OmniPage do not end with paper documents, even though that was our highlight. You face similar issues with PDF files. There is no scanning involved, of course, but many PDFs are image-only. This means you can waste untold amounts of time just looking for the sections which interest you. And if you do manage to find them, you’ll have no choice but to, once more, type everything manually.
But again, OmniPage and OCR can streamline this process. Converting an image-only PDF into a searchable file is effortless. Or you can immediately extract the text into a Word document if that is more convenient for your purposes. Either way, the productivity boost is practically immeasurable.
Conclusion
The possibilities of OCR do not end here and OmniPage places them all at your fingertips. If your job involves a lot of documentation, this technology becomes almost a necessity. And with different packages, Kofax offers you a way to pick the solution which works best for you and your specific requirements.