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Home » Getting frustrated with your paper documents? Here are document capture tips to assist on your journey to going paperless

Getting frustrated with your paper documents? Here are document capture tips to assist on your journey to going paperless

    At times it has come to your mind ” I need to scan these documents” after looking at your pile up of paper documents in your workspace. There is always this helpless feeling and frustration when it comes to starting the process and this usually comes with not knowing where to start.

    This keeps your procrastinating on this task wishing for it to just go away or a day will come when you will do it. Mark you are still using paper documents, duplicating them to make copies and filing. This means even if you try as hard as possible to wish it away, it will never go away and it will keep on haunting you over and over again.

    At times you have scanned a few of your documents and they have been so heavy that even uploading them becomes an issue, which sometimes after uploading slows down your PC or laptop slowing down your work. It leaves you wondering how you will manage if you were to scan all your piled up documents. Would it mean your work will come to a standstill?

    With the dynamic digital era where things are changing so fast like the shooting star you can never miss a solution. And this comes in the form of different document capture software developed by different providers, which can take you a long way in eliminating the frustrations you are having with your digital documents. This minimizes your digital storage space?

    In the market there are document capture software that can help you to  reduce your scanned document size using an optical character recognition (OCR). These software only captures text on your document and not the whole document as an image reducing the size of your document.

    You don’t have to spend a whole load of cash to be able to have these software because you can even access them on your phone whether android or IOS. And you can also buy scanners which are OCR enabled to ease your workload. There are more expensive software but the price increases with the workload.

    I’ll give you are few of the most common ones, though there are so many in the market, it can take a whole day to go through them. They will include both the smartphone scanning applications and scanner software. You will find that with the phone scanning applications there even some which are free but they have limited features, though by just paying more they will be able to serve you maximumly. They have the OCR feature which will be able to capture text only and not the document as a whole. Hereby are a few of them, though if you want to know more you can always reach out for more conversation

    Google drive

    It is hard to associate google drive with scanning but yes google drive has a document scanning feature. This feature is preinstalled in most if not all android phones. If you want to scan a few pages and save as a pdf it works. Open the app tap the +button and select scan to begin scanning. Image enhancing are applied by default. You can choose to either scan in color or black & white and it is free.

    Google docs

    After scanning using google drive you can use google docs, which is a free online application to, edit and share documents. You can create and edit documents from anywhere and can also import documents from my computer. After editing on google docs you can then download in your preferred format.

    Adobe scan

    The adobe scanner recognizes your text automatically while scanning your document. It can scan your receipts, documents, notes, business cards and even photos. This can be used on the computers, It has an Iphone application and android phones application. It is easy to use and it is free.

    Myscans

    is also a phone scanner and document organizer and it is simple to use. You use it as if you are taking a photo of the scan whether a document, business card or photo. It detects the edges and converts the photo into a pdf document and stores or shares.

    Genius scan

    This is a free scanning app but to have additional features like the OCR, password protecting PDFs and exporting files to popular cloud storage services.

    Smartdocs scanner

    Can do a good job of a pdf scanner though the user interface is not the best. It is free but the one without ads is a paid version. It exports scans to pdf, jpg and word format and has a built in OCR feature.

    Scan2x

    Is a digital document scanner software and it offers an intelligent document capture solution within reach of every user in an organization. Scan2x prompts users for additional information during scan time based on data in the document being scanned. It automatically recognizes documents, verifies details, and forwards them to the relevant department.

    Tracking the documents from the person responsible for putting them in the system is easy making it a convenient tool for stringent regulatory checks. It automatically organizes where and how your documents are filed and eases traceability. It is convenient for scanning bulk documents with ease. Can be integrated with your document management system, ERP, web service and email. It compresses pdf files.

    Kofax

    is a digital document scanner software and it can be integrated and automated with any system for example with your Electronic Content Management (ECM), ERP, Business Process Management (BPM) and other workflow solutions. It cleans, rotates, crops and straightens the documents while capturing before text extraction.

    Amazon textract

    This is a software from Amazon. You can use amazon textract to create libraries of text that is detected in images and pdf files. It can be integrated and automated into different existing workflows. With amazon extract you don’t pay an upfront commitment fee. You get started for free and only pay for documents you analyze.

    There are many more software out there if these ones don’t appeal to you.

    For more resources:

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