| OCR
Whatever you
do, don't let your staff of professional typists, data entry clerks,
and information specialists know you're learning about optical character
recognition (OCR) software. If they knew, they might be concerned
by the fact that a scanner and some nifty software can do their
jobs in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost.
The value of a scanner to a business increases greatly when combined
with OCR software. When a document is scanned into a computer, the
text in the document is readable, but not editable. This is because
the scanner captures the document as an image. OCR software expands
on the scanning process by reading individual characters and entering
those characters into an editing program such as Word. Documents
scanned using OCR software can be updated, edited, or filed for
later use.
OCR is an example of an idea that has had to wait a little bit longer
than the mainstream acceptance of the personal computer before becoming
a useful business tool. Many early versions of different OCR software
programs were plagued with errors that would negate the time saved
by scanning. Natalie Miller, product manager for Caere's OmniPage
Pro OCR software, believes that such programs have since caught
up to, and exceeded, their human counterparts. "Today there
is no doubt that if you put a human typist next to an OCR engine,"
she says, "the OCR engine will pull out the end result much
faster and more accurately."
Using a clerk who can type seventy words per minute, it would take
more than an hour to transfer a 5,000 word contract to a computer,
assuming the clerk typed error-free. With an accuracy rate of ninety-nine
percent, a scanner and OCR software would require just minutes to
transfer the same information. Wallace Schwab, president of Maurepas
Services Ltd., a Quebec City-based translation company, views his
OCR software as the key to a quick turnaround. "It's a productivity
accelerator," he says.
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