Scanning Software

shopbot

Help! Despite much head scratching, reading of manual and googling I cannot find a solution.

I am trying to scan an A4 document. It is a table of figures originally created in Excel. I cannot import into my PC any other way than scanning. I have Excel 2003, Epson 3490 Scanner and ABBYY FineReader 6.0 Sprint.

I can get it scanned fine. However when I save or import into Excel all the formatting is scrambled and the document is unreadable.

Please can someone give me an idiots guide or recommend better scanning software?

Thanks

SB

nads

Hi,
See if you have better look inserting from Excel by going to Insert> Picture> From Scanner or Camera.

Also, how are you saving the scanned file? what is the file format?

shopbot

I need the final document to be an Excel file so that I can work with it. Will try your suggestion - thanks.

skinnerneil

one page - cant you just retype it?

nickmack

If you are using character recognition software, then try scanning at a slightly higher resolution. If this still doesn't work, it could be that the software is not up to scratch or the document is dirty/uses weird fonts/close spacing and cannot easily be read. I use Ominpage Pro and it seems to be pretty good at character recognition.

shopbot

skinnerneil wrote:

one page - cant you just retype it?

There are 30 rows and 35 columns so it would be a long process!

shopbot

nickmack wrote:

If you are using character recognition software, then try scanning at a slightly higher resolution. If this still doesn't work, it could be that the software is not up to scratch or the document is dirty/uses weird fonts/close spacing and cannot easily be read. I use Ominpage Pro and it seems to be pretty good at character recognition.

Thanks - the characters are small and closely spaced I think this could be the problem.

espresso

What dpi are you scanning at?

shopbot

espresso wrote:

What dpi are you scanning at?

I've tried 300, and 1200 dpi. Apparently 600 dpi is the biggest for OCR (according to the PC)

espresso

My software defaults to 300 dpi for OCR, so if you have already tried 600 dpi which is twice the resolution with no joy, it looks like your stuck! The only other thing that might work if the font is small, is if you could enlarge your original A4 sheet using a photocopier (or your scanner and printer) and then scan it in two halves.

Rex_Mundi

I've never had much luck with OCR software. I had a handwritten book to transcribe into the computer before christmas, and found all my time wasted on this software. It just wouldn't read the pages properly no matter what I did.

In the end, I used Naturally Speaking Pro (fantastic program) which worked very well.