If you are running a business with multiple branches or even a student who is writing some assignments, you have to encounter a number of papers on a daily basis.
These papers may appear before you physically or simply received in digital form. You have to make edits and add some more information to them surely. What will you do?
It is clear that if you decide to rewrite all these papers, it will take much of your time and energy. You have to be very careful as well as you cannot make a mistake to get the best results.
This is the time when OCR can help you a lot in getting the job done in minutes.
Let’s have a look at what is OCR and how it helps in automating data extraction.
What is OCR?
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that is used to recognize text and symbolic data from printed or handwritten documents in order to make edits and save them somewhere else.
This is actually an image-to-text convert technology that is widely used in business and for educational purposes to extract data from images and PDF files.
OCR technology has brought a great revolution in the digital world as it has minimized the burden to rewrite documents before presenting ahead.
It extracts the data by using different technologies and gives you the results in a short time. This machine language data can be edited and saved easily.
In the present age, the need for documents to be scanned has raised to new heights. The OCR technology has made it easy to scan documents and then share them with anyone by using digital or electronic means.
Benefits of OCR technology in data extraction
This useful technology has unlimited and uncountable benefits in today’s life.
Accuracy
Suppose you have received a bulk of documents and have to check them and make changes to them. If you choose the option of rewriting, there are chances that you may make mistakes for sure due to the pressure of work.
A minor mistake can be very dangerous if you are rewriting legal documents or business figures. Even a spelling mistake or numeric change can cause great harm to your work.
OCR technology is very helpful as it does not compromise the accuracy of the text. You will get the 100% accurate data in digital text form and can edit it if needed.
You will not be worried at all about the accuracy and authentication of the data you have extracted in digital language.
Time-saving
No matter you are a business person, job holder, researcher, or a student, you have to follow deadlines in your routine work. You are given tasks with a due date to submit.
Rewriting a bulk of documents is not an easy task to do. This may take most of your time and you will not be able to submit your given assignment in time.
OCR technology enables you to convert images to text in a few seconds and then use the editable data as per your requirements. You can easily convert images into machine text and then make modifications if needed. You can then present it to anyone before the deadline pass.
This handy technology has supported students and businesses very well. The work that was not possible to be done in weeks now can be completed in days.
It increases the productivity of business very much as they can do maximum work in a short time. This has decreased the burden on employees as well. They are now just focusing on their core work instead of extracting data from images manually.
Increase storage space
You have seen a bulk of documents in a lot of files in every office for sure. This is not an easy task to keep them in the good condition for a long time.
It is also the most difficult task to find an old document quickly when needed. You have to go through thousands of papers and files to find the one you are really looking for.
OCR can help you to get rid of this complex problem in a simple way. Now anyone can scan all his documents through OCR and then save this machine language data on an electronic device.
In this way, you can store a whole room full of papers in a computer file. This data is also searchable so you can easily jump to the old document you need to see.
This is the first step towards the “paperless” world as well. These documents are also safer than the paper-documents. You can save them for a long time without damaging the original results.
This data will be saved in any circumstances such as sudden fire breakdown or climate change.
Easy translation
When you are doing business globally or writing a research thesis, you may get some documents in a language other than yours. It would be a very confusing situation for you.
It will take much of your time and energy if you type each line and then translate it into your native language by using language translators.
OCR technology makes it very easy and simple to translate the whole text into any other language in minutes. You just need to extract data from the papers and then copy it. Paste this copied data into a translation and get the results in your native language to understand it properly.
This will save much of your time and you will have plenty of time to read and understand this translated data.
Conclusion
OCR technology has helped human beings to translate handwritten documents or images into machine language text. This extracted text can be edited, saved, or shared using any electronic or digital means.
In this article, we have summed up what is OCR and how it helps in automating data extraction. Here we have mentioned only a few benefits of OCR technology. This article will help you to have an idea of how much this technology is helpful and handy.