How can I transfer data printed on paper to Excel using scanner?

Question

I'm doing a research, part of which is collecting data from medical notes made by doctors who examined the patients, and putting it to Excel for calculation and statistics. The notes have things like age, race, and a field that states disease / no disease. I can do it manually, entering the whole thing directly to Excel, but it will take a century since there are 2000 pages. I thought there has to be some other way just scanning the page and make the data go to Excel right away. How do I do that? Thanks.

Answer 1

Been there, done that. Didn't work well.At the time, we ended up hiring a few data entry people.

It requires a very sophisticated OCR program, and it must resolve to columare and row formatting.

Your best bet might be Omnipage 15 at: http://www.digitalriver.com/v2.0-img/operations/scansoft/site/html/omnipage/omnipage_pro15_standard.html

Answer 2

Not completely impossible, but major nightmare. Even with Object Character Recognition (OCR) software, it probably would not come out into an XL table correctly. Scanning the document normally (such as a .PDF file) has NO RELATIONSHIP with the data. The only real way to accurately work with the data, is to get it from the electronic source. Even if you could get the original information into MS Word, you might have a chance - but not with normal document scanning.