Viewing & Indexing MS Office Documents
SimpleIndex 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.
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.
- Published in OCR, Office PDF Text Processing
Your All-In-One Scanning & Sorting Tool
SimpleIndex® has the ability to perform a wide variety of scanning and document organization tasks quickly and automatically. This makes it a must-have tool for IT departments and consultants who often need to:
- Scan and store various documents on network shares
- Organize existing MS Office, PDF and other files on your network
- Attach files to records in a custom database
- Integrate scanning into custom business applications
- Automate data entry from paper or electronic documents
- Reduce click charges for centralized scanning departments
The wide variety of scanning and indexing tasks you can do with SimpleIndex make it an incredibly useful tool to have in your arsenal. Even if your company already has an enterprise document scanning system, the low cost, fast setup and automated processing features of SimpleIndex can be put to use in many places where your existing system either doesn’t work, is too complex for the task or costs too much in click charges to be feasible.
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Sort and Index MS Office Documents
This video shows the Sort My Documents sample configuration. Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations are automatically sorted using the SimpleIndex template and dictionary matching algorithms.
The files are reorganized using the Sales Rep, Customer, Document Type and Date extracted from the text. SimpleSearch is then used to search and view the sorted files.
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
MS 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
SimpleIndex 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.
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