Can OCR be used in Access?

[Guest]

Hello everyone,

I have a database containing scanned documents. Each document is saved in a
field (OLE object). I have done this successfully and I am able to view the
document on a form.

A friend of mine talked about OCR (object character recognition) and how it
is able to read text in a scanned document. I was thinking, is it possible
to use OCR in Access? And if so, is it possible for the text in the scanned
document to be searchable if I change the field from OLE object to text?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

The answer to both questions is yes.

OCR isn't built into Access, though, so you'd need to get a third-party tool
to aid you in that regard.

 

[Arvin Meyer [MVP]]

OCR scanned files are generally read into a word processor or text file.
Depending upon the program, some of the error correction done in OCR is done
with a spell checker which is especially configured to look for certain
symbols. A find and replace is generally done to pick up these symbols.
Depending upon what is scanned, high quality, high speed scanners can go as
fast as 50 pages per minute. The best solution is to scan the documents, run
the OCR, then develop a set of keywords and link to the documents. You may
find the free DocMgr demo database on my website handy to aid in this work:

http://www.datastrat.com/Download/DocMgr_2K.zip
--
Arvin Meyer, MCP, MVP
Microsoft Access
Free Access downloads
http://www.datastrat.com
http://www.mvps.org/access