Automatic archival of Microsoft Office documents to PDF via batch conversion, indexing and document management workflow.

If you have Microsoft Office or OpenOffice installed, you can use SimpleIndex to automatically convert MS Office documents to PDF files for archival. PDF files are better for archival than editable formats like Word and Excel. They can be annotated, encrypted, searched and viewed with free PDF readers.

There are many free applications that let you convert documents to PDF one at a time. SimpleIndex lets you convert thousands of files at once while it also extracts data from the text for indexing or data entry automation. This feature is ideal for migrating or archiving Office documents to SharePoint, document management systems and custom web applications.

Check and Repair All PDF Files

You can set SimpleIndex to assume that it needs to check every PDF file and fix it.

Go to this location in the Windows Registry:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\SimpleIndex\Misc

Create a New String Value called “FixAllPDF” and set the value to 1

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Keep Pages in Original Order when Bookmarking

If you want to keep all the pages in the same order that they were imported, even though they all go with different bookmarks then do the following.

1.  Open the configuration in Notepad.
2.  Search for <BOOKMARK_PAGE_ORDER>
3.  Change this line from “false” to “true”:  <BOOKMARK_PAGE_ORDER>true</BOOKMARK_PAGE_ORDER>
4.  Save and close.

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How do you select what types of files to process?

You can tell SimpleIndex what types of files it should process and which file types to ignore.

This is done by clicking “Job Options” On the “Batch” tab you will find a field labeled “Input file types or mask”. These are the file types that SimpleIndex will input files from. The default types are:

TIF,PDF,JPG,GIF,BMP,DOC,XLS,PPT,DOCX,XLSX,PPTX,VSD,DWG,AVI,MP3

To process all files, enter *

SimpleIndex will ignore any file whose extension does not appear on the list.

In SimpleIndex 6 or above you can enter file masks to filter input files. Some examples are:

abc*.pdf (PDF files starting with “abc”)
ab??ef.* (All files starting with “ab”, 2 characters and “ef”)

It is possible to have some file types open automatically in their default application. This can be done by inserting a pipe “|” into the list. Any file types after the pipe will be opened in their default application. For example:

TIF,PDF,JPG|WAV,MP3,WMV,AVI

will cause SimpleIndex to display image files and open sound and video files in the default media player.

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How do you configure OCR to read index information from MS Office or PDF documents?

MS Office and PDF files generated by software or PDF printer drivers already have the text you need to recognize in the file. Scanned documents need to use OCR to read text from an image of the page. With Office and PDF files, SimpleIndex can just read the text, which is much faster and accurate than image OCR.

To recognize index fields from the document text, first create OCR fields on the Index tab as you would normally. Next, on the Zones & OCR options tab, check the “Use Full Page OCR for this Field” option for each OCR field. This tells SimpleIndex to process the existing file text.

If the index value is a unique pattern of digits or list of possible values, use Template or Dictionary matching to locate the value within the text. Please see the manual for details on Template and Dictionary matching.

If the value appears in a specific location in each file, coordinates can be used to locate it. When processing text, the X, Y, Width and Height settings correspond to line and column numbers within the file text. This is explained in greater depth in the manual.

SimpleIndex will assume that any TXT file with the same name as a file being processed is the OCR text for that file, so this method can work with any type of file.

Find out more about Optical Character Recognition on the SimpleOCR Guide.

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Organize Office Documents with Text Parsing

This video shows the Sort My Documents sample job included with the SimpleIndex trial download. It shows how you can organize office documents automatically by parsing the file’s text for relevant metadata and keywords. You can then use those keywords to tag documents with metadata and create standardized folders and filenames.

Organize Office Document Automatically with Text Parsing

First we sort Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations automatically using the SimpleIndex template and dictionary matching algorithms that match patterns and keywords in the parsed text.

Then the files are organized into folders and filenames using the Sales Rep, Customer, Document Type and Date values extracted from the text.

Organize Office Documents for Cloud Storage

You can also upload organized files to SharePoint or Cloud Storage platforms without the chaos and disorganization you inevitably get when users create their own folders and filenames.

Organize Office Documents for Document Management

In the video, we use SimpleSearch to search and view the sorted files. But you can just as easily use any third party document management system or custom database to perform keyword or full-text searching.

You can use the SimpleView embedded viewer to view Office documents, PDF files and images in a common interface. In the video we use the full version of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to edit Office documents right from the search screen.

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FAQ Related to Organizing Office Documents

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MS Office & PDF Text Parsing

Office Videos | PDF Video

The template and dictionary matching capabilities of SimpleIndex‘s OCR function can be used to extract index information from the text of existing MS Office and PDF files, or any file with an accompanying TXT file. SimpleIndex® will search the document for matches on unique patterns and value lists, then index the document with the matching data. Zone coordinates can be set to limit the search area to pre-defined regions on standard forms. The result is a fully automated indexing and renaming process for all your electronic documents!

Using existing text, SimpleIndex can index and rename hundreds of files each minute and achieve perfect accuracy. These files can then be quickly searched with SimpleIndex Retrieval, SharePoint and Google search engines, or uploaded into your company’s document/content management system or custom business applications.

Enhanced Text Parsing & PDF Support

PDF Form Read Write DataMS Office and PDF text parsing features are now included in the Basic version of SimpleIndex, making it much more affordable to enable automatic document sorting on the desktop. Additional Office and PDF features include:

  • Convert any MS Office, HTML, XML and image files to PDF before processing
  • Read and write password protected PDF file
  • Searchable PDF output (Image + Hidden Text)
  • Interactive template builder and tester
  • Easily select PDF or PDF/A output format
  • Native PDF viewer and auto-repair of problematic PDFs
  • Read data from PDF forms
  • Populate blank PDF forms with index data

Batch Convert Office Documents to PDF

If you have Microsoft Office or OpenOffice installed, you can use SimpleIndex to automatically convert MS Office documents to PDF files for archival. PDF files are better for archival than editable formats like Word and Excel. They can be annotated, encrypted, searched and viewed with free PDF readers.

There are many free applications that let you convert documents to PDF one at a time. SimpleIndex lets you convert thousands of files at once while it also extracts data from the text for indexing or data entry automation. This feature is ideal for migrating or archiving Office documents to SharePoint, document management systems and custom web applications.

Quickly Organize Any File on Your Computer

SimpleIndex lets you process any type of file on your computer. If an OLE-enabled viewer is installed, SimpleIndex will display the document on the screen. Other documents can be opened automatically in their default application when they are indexed. Quickly type index field data that can be used to reorganize the files into subfolders and structured filenames for browsing and searching on your network, or uploaded to your document/content management system or custom business application.

If the file has an accompanying text file (*.TXT) with the same name, the text in that file can be used for index field extraction, fully automating the process.

Viewing & Indexing MS Office Documents

SimpleCoversheet Barcode Indexing CoversheetsSimpleIndex features full support for viewing and editing MS Office documents (Word, PowerPoint and Excel) on computers with or without MS Office installed. The full application interface is displayed within the SimpleIndex viewer, letting users view the full content of the documents, edit them with all the features of MS Office and save the changes. Modify privileges can be denied using Windows file security or by the SimpleIndex administration wizard to keep out unauthorized changes.

If MS Office is not installed, SimpleIndex can open and display them in the built-in viewer in read-only mode.

KB Articles for MS Office & PDF Text Parsing

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