• Scan & OCR old Outlook contact printouts to reimport into OL

    Home » Forums » AskWoody support » Windows » Windows – other » Scan & OCR old Outlook contact printouts to reimport into OL

    Author
    Topic
    #487549

    I have a few hundred pages of Outlook contacts that have been printed out (several contacts to a page).
    I’m looking for some type of OCR software that I can use with my own page fed scanner to scan these pages and turn them back into data to re-import into Outlook.

    I know that CardScan used to have software that worked with 3rd party scanners, but now it looks like the software only works with their single card at a time scanners.

    I no longer have access to the original OL data to export/import.

    Viewing 5 reply threads
    Author
    Replies
    • #1372072

      Just about any OCR software is actually stand-alone software. It might not integrate with the scanner (hand off) as well as something built in but as long as the scanner can produce the precise output that is best for OCR-ing, I think one is more interested in clarity of output from the scanner and in proper conversion (highest accuracy possible) to a format you can easily use once processed. I would look at Omnipage 18 on Amazon for $55 if you are looking for one of the best.

    • #1372077

      Try scanning the pages into PDF format, and then opening the resultant document into Word or WordPerfect. You may end up with editable text in Word or Word Perfect.

      http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2383733,00.asp

      Group "L" (Linux Mint)
      with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server
    • #1372173

      Guess I wasn’t clear since you both missed the real point of my question.

      I know I can OCR the pages, and then manually convert them to csv etc to import.
      What I am looking to to is to totally automate the process. eg do exactly what CardScan does, but with a sheet fed scanner. I want to put a stack of pages into the scanner and let the software figure out the fields and where new contact records start etc.

      Thanks

    • #1372199

      Is the data comma (or replaceable character) separated? If so you should be able to step batch process. If not you should still be able to batch process (semi-automated) but I don’t know how you would get separators in other than manually once they are text files in order to import.

    • #1372226

      I don’t know if this software[/url] does what you want, but it seems to indicate that it can take full page documents and convert them into contacts.

      “With ScanSnap, you can scan your business cards and full size documents, and import your contacts directly into a contact management software or CRM solution. ScanSnap S1500 comes with the latest version of CardMinder business card software, the new Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard, ABBYY FineReader for PC, ScanSnap Organizer software, and convenient “Scan to” functions.”

      • #1372460

        I checked with ScanSnap and the software unfortunately only does business cards

    • #1440093

      You can check Card Scanning Solutions: http://www.card-reader.com/ , they have a great OCR and offer many options beside their business cards scanning.
      I first had Dymo’s card reader but it was not always accurate.
      Hope this helps!

    Viewing 5 reply threads
    Reply To: Scan & OCR old Outlook contact printouts to reimport into OL

    You can use BBCodes to format your content.
    Your account can't use all available BBCodes, they will be stripped before saving.

    Your information: