We’ve been a smidgeon busy over the last few weeks, so my final post of the three Fujitsu ScanSnap series has come a little while after the last one. So it’s been a while since we scanned some photos and marveled at how easy it was. Time fortunately hasn’t dimmed my ability to operate the ScanSnap because, much like me, it’s very simple to use.
Our final challenge was to have a go with the “OCR” functionality. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, basically it allows you to scan stuff and the clever old software recognises that there are words on the page and converts them into editable text. Why’s this useful? Well imagine you’ve been giving a letter that you need to twiddle with a bit and resend. Problem is, you’ve only been given a paper copy of it and you don’t want to type the whole thing out again.
We’ve got loads of things knocking around that were printed out in the 80’s on dot matrix printers that don’t exist any more. And the computers or floppy disks they once lived on are no more. So we’re going to scan some of those! Hurrah! But I’m not going to show that as an example here, because you know, it’s private stuff and all that. No, the example you’ll get is a nice OCR’d page from our boiler service plan, which happened to be the nearest thing to hand!
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| it was a sheet of paper, now its a fully editable document. Hurrah!!! |
So how did the process go? As ever, plugging the scanner in and firing it up was simplicity itself. I plonked the sheet of paper in the scanner and hit the bright blue button. The paper chuntered through at a fair old rate and then the dialogue box appeared. I selected to Word document. The software told me I need to change the settings from scan as a JPEG (image) to PDF and try again. Which I duly did. A minute later I was subtly altering the terms of the boiler servicing agreement. And you know what? For the third time I did it all without reading the manual once.