[P1] Paperless Office Achieved?

[Jack Rodgers]

On Friday, March 7, 2003, at 09:09  AM, donhinkle at att.net wrote:

> My belief is that I can locate a procedure that has worked for others 
> and that
> will be fine. Oh. besides, I don't plan to use this on anything 
> financial, just
> immense collations of paper files.

Scanning documents into the computer is only part of the problem. You 
can buy a scanner with a document feeder and depending upon how high 
your stack of papers, a few very large hard drives.

After you have a 10,000 or so scanned documents, you will discover that 
you cannot find the one document with the phrase "this is the important 
phrase I want to find". The reason is that the documents are scanned as 
bit image graphics and as such text does not exist.

So, you could create a database for keywords, etc. and add a field for 
filename and then search the database to find the document name. Adding 
useable keywords is important as is the design of the database. With 
Filemaker this would be easy and you could either store the docs in the 
database, not really recommended, or just use pointers to them, an 
option Filemaker offers. You then organize your files on permanent 
storage so nothing moves or is deleted. Do a find with Filemaker and 
the document can be displayed on the layout.

Optical recognition software will take your scanned graphics and 
convert them into text but the scans suffer from inaccurate recognition 
and the spelling errors can be quite high. The advantage is that the 
resulting text requires significantly less hd space than the graphic.

Another possibility is to go to the distributor of the info and ask if 
they have it on a database or CD. Parts books that take up 12 or more 
inches on your shelves can be reduced to a database of a 100 megs or so 
that hides away on your hard drive. Some vendors supply CDs with 
breakaway parts, etc.

Perhaps someday producers of data will stop supplying it on paper and 
only use electronic files...

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jackrodgers at earthlink.net
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