Document imaging software

[t1grm]

Having dragged myself into the 21st century by ripping my CD collection to MP3 I’m now hooked and have decided that I‘m going to start scanning all my paper docs (bank statements, utility bills etc).

Does anyone do this and if so do you have any hints and tips?

The actual scanning seems straight forward enough but the main issue seems to me to be what software to use to catalogue it. I’d like something that can scan to pdf. I’d also like something that lets me keyword search or browse my documents rather like I can do with music in Realplayer without having to incorporate the keywords into each document file name. So I could browse by document type (e.g. bank statement) or by sender (e.g. the phone company) in a sort of explorer tree structure.

OmniPage seems be the main package for this. Has anyone used it? Will it do what I’m looking for above?

[FourWheelDrift]

I've used TextBridge, not recently but when I did it was very good at character recognition.

But if you just want to scan the documents as images then any scanning software that you'll get with the scanner will do.

>> Edited by FourWheelDrift on Monday 25th October 18:48

[simpo two]

Hate to spoil your headlong rush into the next century - but it would be much simpler and quicker just to keep the bills for a year, then bin them. The desire to scan and OCR utility bills is, frankly, worrying

[Muncher]

simpo two said:

Hate to spoil your headlong rush into the next century - but it would be much simpler and quicker just to keep the bills for a year, then bin them. The desire to scan and OCR utility bills is, frankly, worrying

[t1grm]

Muncher said:

simpo two said: Hate to spoil your headlong rush into the next century - but it would be much simpler and quicker just to keep the bills for a year, then bin them. The desire to scan and OCR utility bills is, frankly, worrying

Yes I know it’s sad but it’s not just utility bills – that was just an example. I let several properties and am self employed via an offshore company so I get mountains of post. Inland Revenue, VAT man, accountants, banks, credit cards, pension & insurance companies, developers, letting agents, tenants, contractors. You name it I get it. I seem to have letters from at least half of the above each week.

I have a whole bookcase of box files bursting at the seams and every time I need to respond to a letter I find myself spending hours on end searching through them to find so-and-so letter/bill/contract to photocopy to go with my response. It would be much easier to have online images of all of this so I could search it and print off the appropriate document to go with the letter or better still email it as an attachment.

So I’m not that sad really… well I am but that’s another story…


Edited to add: I don't want to OCR them either, just catalogue them for reference

>> Edited by t1grm on Monday 25th October 19:39

[malman]

Don't know anythiing cheap or free off the shelf (which there must be somewhere) but a simple access database will do it.

Sort of these fields shouldn't take more than ten mins to knock up.

My ref
Their ref
date
Name
Company
etc.. + link field to pdf file.

one very simple document index, bespoke and customiseable (sp?)

[ErnestM]

Office 2003 comes with a rudimentary document imaging and filing system. It could be just the thing...

ErnestM