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Our Tech Guy answers your questions

Dear Tech Guy,

In your March 2001 technology column, you spoke of a way to scan items and move them into an Excel spreadsheet. Could you please give me more information about this or tell me where to look? We currently receive inventory lists, which we retype In Excel. This would save us lots of typing time.

Denise McDonald,

Universal Bearing Co., Detroit

Dear Denise,

First, I will caution you that you need to be comfortable working in Excel and in PCs in general. And to use the combination of a scanner, OCR (optical character recognition) and Excel to get your end result will take a considerable amount of time to get perfected if you aren't familiar with these tools.

Having made my disclaimer, once you have done the setup in Excel to run a macro or whatever you need to take the OCR output and put it into final form, your daily routine will be brain-dead simple. Scan, run the macro, done. However, if your Excel document is in a different format than the scanned document, this will also prove to be a challenge.

The documents you are scanning should be as clear and clean as possible, with at least a 12-point font. If your document is small font, light-colored text or bad copy quality, you might want to give up before you start. OCR has made enormous improvements in the last 10 years, but still it isn't perfect. The human eye still can't be beat by machine.

How clean your copy is determines how much work you will have to do in Excel. The OCR can be very frustrating with a bad copy (letters aren't clear and dark, or lots of "dirt" on the sheet) because it won't recognize the letters correctly, and then you have to examine the whole thing to see where errors are. You may want to incorporate a table of known valid entries to scan rows of your imported documents to automatically check for you to make sure that whatever was scanned was a valid entry.

As to what to buy if you don't already have a scanner and software, I currently use a scanner called the Visioneer PaperPort mx. It is several years old and does only black and white. The software I use is by Scansoft. It's called PaperPort Deluxe. It's kind of like a Windows Explorer for images. It has a folder view on the left, and a desktop to the right that shows thumbnails of the documents I scan in.

The software is a big piece of making scanning easy. All I have to do is drag a scanned image from the desktop to an Excel icon, and the software launches an OCR package that takes the fax and changes it into text, which it then shoves into Excel. This is the point where you would create and run your macro to clean up whatever was imported to look like what you type in now. I would recommend this package no matter what scanner you use. It comes with OCR software and auto-configures itself on installation.

There are much newer versions of scanners than mine, and they do color. The important thing to me is that they do as much of the work as possible. When I use mine, I slide a piece of paper I want to scan into the feed slot, and it is sucked into the scanner at the same time that the software to use the scan is launched on my PC. Flat beds have to be positioned, then the software has to be started manually, and if you have a large document with several pages, it is just too cumbersome.

If you are doing really large documents, document feeders can be used that attach to flat beds that work kind of like the hoppers on copy machines to rapidly auto feed sheets of paper through.

Hans Erickson is chief information officer at the Detroit Regional Chamber. If you have questions or suggestions about technology for our Tech Guy.