Every business wants to be organized. When it comes to paper documents, it used to be that organization was proportional to hours of meticulous filing and labeling. After all, what good is storing a file if you can never find it again?
OCR Software Makes it Easy
Nowadays, we have OCR software to find documents instantly, no matter how it’s stored. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) means that, once scanned, the words on a document can be recognized, searched, and retrieved by a computer. Think of it as an assistant who has every word, phrase and topic of every document you have ever filed memorized. Not only that, but this assistant can retrieve any document you’ve described instantly, along with others like it.
Document scanning services like OfficeDrop provide you with that very assistant. Hours spent organizing paper documents physically can be replaced by sending them to OfficeDrop for digital conversion. The best scanning + OCR projects need:
- High quality OCR. Without highly accurate OCR software, your text will not be searchable. Our tests have shown that Abby’s OCR engine is the most accurate.
- Intelligent index. The index is just like the index in a book; it references where the words, characters and numbers appear in your set of documents and can point you to them.
- High enough DPI. DPI is an indication of the detail of the scan. We recommend 200+ DPI. With 200 DPI, your images will be clear enough so that your OCR can cleanly read the words in your documents.
- Central digital storage. If you are going to easily search your files, you need them in a single location. The best scanning and OCR aren’t helpful if you have to search through dozens of DVDs to find file that you are looking for.
- Easy to use search. Complicated search (highly structured search) works for some engineering intensive fields, but is usually not user friendly enough to be helpful for the typical small business. A simple search tool (think of it as your own personal Google search box) is the easiest way to sort through your files.
Once stored, you are able to search all documents via search terms, and never have to stress about organizing or finding those documents again. Document storage and retrieval is easy with OCR and OfficeDrop.
