The Advantages of OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

February 13th, 2018

All Things OCR…

Are you here to better understand how OCR (Optical Character Recognition) can help your business? Good news, you’re in luck!

Our guide below covers how it works, its use in modern-day business life and the advantages of OCR technology

The technology may sound complex, but rest assured it’s really not. It’s highly useful and used widely for all sorts of tasks. OCR is a technology that recognises and captures text contained in any image (from an invoice to a diagram in a book) and converts it into a searchable and editable electronic file. Handy, right? 

How OCR Works

Unlike us, computers aren’t capable of recognising the written word (just yet). Whether it’s presented as a handwritten note or a PDF, extracting data can be a task too much. That’s where OCR comes in. While scanning documents to images offer a quick fix for retrieval, without OCR or manual indexing, you’ll still need to search pages of text to find what you’re looking for. 

OCR presents the text contained in an image and translates it into machine-readable data for a computer. Once the nifty bit of tech has done its job, it gives you the information in an editable format of your choice: Word, Excel, a searchable PDF or a simple text file. 

An image displaying how text is converted using OCR (Optimal Character Recognition) technology

How Can OCR Be Used?

Do you know the benefits of OCR and how it can make your life easier?

Searching through heaps of papers contained in dusty files needn’t be a task thanks to OCR. This isn’t the only task it can assist with either. Lots of businesses rely heavily on data and here is where OCR really is key. From the text in an invoice being non-editable to a scanned document that needs to be reformatted digitally, any way to cut out time and effort is useful in these cases. 

OCR has the ability to automate practically anything that’s text-related and allows you to modify the data easily. 

3 examples of the advantages of OCR in action

Retrieving invoice data is easy with the use of OCR. There’s no need to manually input all of the data into digital format when the technology can do the job for you!

Storage of important information is important for many businesses, that’s why OCR is used by many public services for exactly this reason. 

Extracting tables from documents can be a very lengthy task. One of the best benefits of OCR is that you can swap hours of computer work for a 1-minute task. Which would you rather go for? 

OCR’s magic doesn’t end here. There are many more ways that this tech can help… 

OCR Benefits for Your Business

You should have a better understanding of the advantages of OCR. But perhaps you’re still wondering how it can help really help your business and, why you should consider using it. Used across many sectors including government and educational environments, the technology isn’t popular for no reason…

Save Your Fingers With Typing 

Typing, typing, typing. Is that all you seem to do? OCR can help when a retyping task is on your to-do list. There’s no need to spend hours at your computer desk when the technology is capable of whizzing through the text for you. Save time, effort and benefit from a fully-searchable digital document at the end. 

Documents Will Be Text Searchable

Do you want to spend hours searching for data? Bulky files are gone thanks to the use of OCR. You can scan all the documents that you need and they’ll be text searchable too. Simply enter a keyword into the ‘searchable PDF’ next time you need a piece of data quickly.

An example of a searchable PDF after OCR conversion
A searchable PDF example

Digital Can Be Safer

You won’t need to worry about physical storage, documents can be found in one place – digitally. Digital versions are far easier to backup and you won’t risk any tea spillages either. Control exactly where your data is saved and access it whenever you need to. 

Edit Documents Easily

Editing scanned documents can cause a headache. Therefore one of the best OCR benefits is it makes this task a breeze. It’ll swiftly convert them and allow you to make the changes you need to in the format of your choice. 

Less Stress Overall

OCR = happier customers and happier employees. Why? With less paper there’s less clutter and tasks are all-round easier. Stop keeping clients on hold and benefit from running a simple search on your computer. Get the data that you need quickly. Avoid the filing cabinets and keep your customers engaged.

Empower Your Business With OCR 

We don’t use the word empower for no reason. You really can transform many aspects of your business and day-to-day tasks with the use of OCR. Now that you have a better understanding of the advantages of OCR, why not ditch the paperwork and go digital? Our OCR services are designed to meet your requirements.

Our expert team uses professional scanning hardware which leads to higher quality images and better OCR accuracy compared to those using standard office equipment. No document is off-limits, and no volume of work is ever too much.

Contact us today and learn more about how our OCR scanning and conversion service can empower your business. 

We provide free, dedicated advice for your needs always.

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