5 Reasons to Use Optical Character Recognition (OCR)!

Optical Character Recognition

When you have to deal with so many hardcopies, textual images, and PDFs on your job or in your business, you need optical character recognition (OCR) technology.

OCR is used to convert the non-editable soft copies into the editable text documents. Therefore, you don’t need to retype the text in the images, magazines, or PDFs manually to make the required changes to them. OCR is a tool that quickly converts such files into editable text versions.

For instance, when you receive an electronic image of a brochure, use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert it into a fully editable file so you can easily update its text. If you have an electronic image in the PDF, .jpg, .png, .jpeg, or similar files, use SodaPDF OCR to convert it into the textual version that you can edit, copy, and paste. 

Let’s delve into some important reasons why you should use OCR technology in your business. 

Optical Character Recognition

1.    Make Your Immutable Files Searchable:

When you have lots of PDF files and textual electronic images, the information they contain is not searchable and editable. That means you have lots of frozen text. This kind of information affects your ability to search for something specific quickly. The OCR technology enables you to convert that frozen text into machine-readable data so that it is searchable.

This means OCR enables you to find the specific information in your documents that can be copied and pasted for other uses. Unsearchable documents are useless, especially if you have volumes of PDF documents and electronic images containing important data. 

2.    Make Your Edits Easy:

Change is unavoidable, and especially if you are in a business, you should be flexible enough to adjust to the changes. OCR is a tool that makes your business operations more adaptable to changes. Convert those immutable files into text documents that are easily be edited.

You need to have OCR to convert those PDFs into editable text documents on the go. That means you don’t have to compose a document from scratch when any changes have to be made. Instead, you can only change the part that needs improvement.

3.    Prevent Human Errors:

Human errors are unavoidable, but you should be able to make changes. OCR not only enables you to edit and search your immutable documents but also detects the incorrect or misprinted data in your documents. Thus, all human errors can be proactively resolved using OCR technology as it enables you to prevent mistakes. 

4.    Save time and Money:

OCR technology allows you to save a lot of time and money by reducing the paperwork. Most businesses still have a lot of documents in the hard form. A big chunk of data that businesses handle is still in the paper form.

OCR significantly reduces the time and money spent on manually entering the data into the computer from scratch. You can simply use the OCR to scan the printed or electronic images containing text and obtain a digitalized form. 

5.    Save Space:

You’ll also save a lot of your office space that has been occupied by piles of paper documents. You can digitalize all your paper documents with the help of OCR and free some space in your office.

Storing your invoices, receipts, and other papers need additional space in your office and also require a lot of manual handling as well. Less paper translates into more order and space in your workspace. 

Optical character recognition article and permission to publish here provided by Harry Poulson. Originally written for Supply Chain Game Changer and published on February 13, 2020.