Form Data Capture - Making Your Research Easier

A lot of you that read this article will without doubt be interested in data capture, perhaps how it works, how it can help and where the best places are to seek out the service. Well you've come to the right place.

In this article I'll be talking about form data capture, a type of data capture that allows the fields, check boxes and text areas to be captured and the data rendered digitally enabling you to see the results easily, without having to go through each individual form making a tally for yourself. This kind of service is often used by market researchers, employers and people and companies in general who issue surveys, feedback forms and other typed of general research data.

For a long time in the past form capture was done manually. These days, thankfully, it is a standard process to hand your forms over to a professional document scanning and data capture company for them to extract the data and send it back to you when completed. This is a fairly simple and inexpensive process which can save you a lot of time, money and resources.

The form capture company will usually set out a template for their industry quality software to look at and assess each field to look for data such as check boxes and written areas. Unfortunately areas that have been filled out by hand can not usually be scanned using data capture as technology right now can only read printed fonts, but it is still pretty inexpensive to outsource this to a document scanning and data capture company to input the data manually. It will obviously take a little longer, but the information could be very valuable to you. Often clients will also call to ask for our opinion and general tips on how to set out a survey or feedback form so it is easier for us to scan and quicker to process. However this doesn't mean that you have to stick to our guidelines, as I say the document scanning company can set up a template for the scanners and software to look at and assess.

Once the scanning is complete, the data that has been captured will then usually be produced into some sort of presentation for you, usually with statistics and graphs so you can look through the information gathered in a simple and unconfusing way.

Data capture of forms has been known to help thousands of companies every year to gather their data with the greatest of ease to them, saving time, money and manpower, and the results are usually highly accurate. However make sure to choose a good company and ask if you can send them some samples before you commit to them. The samples will give you a good suggestion of how good the company's technology and staff are and ultimately that's what matters.

Form capture is a great tool if used correctly and done by a reputable scanning company. It could help your business save potentially thousands of pounds per year.

Steve Wright is marketing manager at Pearl Scan Solutions, a UK based document scanning and document management company offering services throughout the UK. We also data capture forms and offer a wide variety of data capture services.

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Can A Data Capture Service Recognise Handwriting?

One of the most commonly asked questions in a document scanning bureau is if it's possible to use data capture to scan and digitise hand-written documents. With the likes of Ancestry.com and other online services which offer the ability to look at older hand-written documents from a time before computers and even typewriters were around offering text-searchable PDF files, a lot of people tend to assume that data capture software, even high quality industry developed wares, can capture handwriting with ease.

Sadly the answer is inevitably no, at least not yet. The trouble is people have different styles of handwriting, different sizes, different stroke lengths and different ways of joining letters together, especially on older documents where people either wrote caligraphically or wrote very messily, neither of which is readable by even the top data capture software.

Some handwriting however can be recognised by computer software but only if it is exceptionally clear, written boldly and printed ie. no connection from letter to letter. However this is very rarely the case and even then the chances of all the wording being accurately recognised is relatively low.

The likes of Ancestry.com will have had each individual file captured by the human eye and written in with the human hand rather than any kind of software or automation process purely because in this instance it adds a better accuracy for the project. This of course would have cost significantly more and you're using a human's labour which of course also makes the process more extended than if it was done by automation. If you have the funding and the need for the documents to be professionally captured, then it is a good choice.

All other types of data capture coming from early typewriters right up to the latest computer fonts of today are easily recognised by industry specialised software used by specialist data capture companies but this is unfortunately as far as it can go.

In the document scanning community there's nothing we'd love more than to be able to accurately produce handwritten documents into a digital format by way of automation or software but, at least in the meantime, this is just not plausible. Give it a couple more years and ask me then and I might just have a different answer for you.

Steve Wright is marketing manager at Pearl Scan Solutions, a UK based document scanning and document management company offering services throughout the UK. Pearl Scan also offer thorough and professional data capture services which we have constantly improved and offered for nearly a decade.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Can-A-Data-Capture-Service-Recognise-Handwriting?&id=5891139

Data Capture Software

Data capture software has, in the past, been something of a niche area and was developed primarily by document scanning and management companies in order that the client would send them the documents and capture what is on the page from there. However, although this continues to be a very valuable service that is easy on the pocket, it can still prove to be a pain for a lot of companies which have to continuously send off their documents to be captured which could take any length of time, depending on the company used.

However data capture software for the somewhat more mainstream market is a relatively new invention because of the complexities of what a software that effectively looks at an image and does it's best to read fields etc. comes with. However there's now a number of software on the market of which PSI:Capture is amongst the best.

PSI:Capture, like some of the other data capture software out there, offers companies the ability to scan and capture documents, surveys, feedback forms and much more with the flexibility of a user-friendly piece of software.

You don't need me to tell you that this can save a great deal of time, but it can also save greatly in the expenses department, especially at a time where money isn't exactly flowing pretty much anywhere. Data capture software offers pretty much what a company that offers a data capture service does, but at your own convenience within your own offices. This usually means that you would no longer need to outsource your data capture and therefore save a lot of money, particularly if you're a company that does this on a regular basis.

Capture software effectively offers a single platform for scanning in files and capturing them at the same time rather than having to use two pieces of software to do one job. This saves considerable time and also offers top quality results in terms of accuracy which are akin to that you would expect from a professional service.

A number of capture software, like the previously mentioned PSI:Capture, can also plug into popular document management systems and online systems such as Microsoft's Sharepoint system. This makes for an even higher convenience in cutting out another time consuming task.

But of course, the main pull of data capture software is the fact that you can scan and save all of your data that you've gathered, whether this be via surveys and questionnaires, employment forms, legal forms or medical forms, data capture software is made to make the dull experience of piecing together your gathered data that little bit more simple and considerably easier. Data capture software is already being used widely in hospitals and other medical practices, law firms and of course, data research companies. It has all manner of uses, some of which you might not even have thought of but through using the software you can finally cut out the middleman and the costs that come with that, and start to gather your data yourself quickly and easily.

If you'd like to learn more about data capture software, please visit out website and take a look at what it can offer you and your business.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Capture-Software&id=6892040

5 Reasons For OCR Software Errors When Extracting Data From Scanned Documents to Editable Format

Optical character recognition programs generally work best with images from print media books and computer generated copies from laser and inkjet printers. Some documents are not suitable for conversion to editable format. Images with poor quality or other issues should be identified to determine whether OCR is right for your project. Some of them are:

# 1 - Hand-written or hand-stamped sheets are not suitable for automated processing. Pages containing annotations and cross-outs produce a high rate of error. In addition, originals with mixed text, pictures and graphics tend to have recognition problems, but usually can be corrected with some manual adjustment.

# 2 - Scans of old documents that have lost contrast, color definition and clarity will not have optimal results. In addition, pages generated from fax machines and dot matrix printers generally provide poor results.

# 3 - Hard copies typed on a typewriter with a worn ribbon, carbon copies and sheets with light characters do not produce good results with optical character recognition. By the end of the 1980s, computer word processor applications had replaced typewriters. However, many archives contain a high number of typewritten pages.

# 4 - Lightweight paper stocks that crease or crumple, jamming the scanner are another issue that may be encountered. Poor quality originals can be scanned on a flatbed scanner or copied on photocopy machine to avoid further damage to the original. Another solution is to capture the files with a digital camera. However, there are no guarantees that the extra work and effort will provide an acceptable output.

# 5 - Hard copies without proper formatting and columns are not suitable for output to excel. In such cases, it is faster and more accurate to key in the data manually. However, OCR scanning to excel spreadsheet format works well for sheets that are delimited with tabs. The tabulated data should closely resemble tab CSV - Comma-separated values.

In cases where the originals are inappropriate for OCR software, a better solution is manual data entry. Automated processing does not save resources when you need to go back and substantially correct the output. It is much easier and accurate to do it right the first time. You will be surprised to find out that outsourcing your project to a scanning company with offshore BPO services (business process outsourcing services) is both a timely and affordable solution. This is due to the lower cost of offshore labor which makes manual correction and re-typing cost effective.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?5-Reasons-For-OCR-Software-Errors-When-Extracting-Data-From-Scanned-Documents-to-Editable-Format&id=4172634

Implementing a Data Capture System and Choosing the Correct Hardware

Overlooking Critical Hardware Considerations

A server can be the solid foundation of a document capture system, or it can be the thorn in the side for a company and renders a document capture system virtually useless. A successful software implementation is dependent on properly chosen and configured hardware, and a system for capture is no different. So when you're looking at purchasing hardware, a little bit of planning can go a long way toward a successful data capture implementation. And, although every company's server configuration and specs can be different, depending on the size and scope of their data capture implementation, there are some items that should be considered, regardless of the size of the project.

Scalability: Almost any data capture or document management consultant will tell you that scalability is one of the most important, and often overlooked, factors when considering document management or data capture hardware. After a successful document capture system is implemented and rolled out to production, you have to respond with a higher level of server service as more users and documents tax the processing performance and take up memory. Many servers can reach new levels of performance easily if you add more resources, such as processors, disk space, and memory. Other servers can be upgraded to new higher-performance servers without changing any of the software. Our advice is that it is far better to install a server that is at the low end of its capabilities than one that's at the top end -- but make sure that your system is scalable. This allows you to respond to increased usage by adding hardware resources quickly. For instance, you can increase server performance simply by adding more CPU or memory to support the increasing number of capture stations. In a nutshell, hardware scalability is the key to your long term data capture system viability.

High availability, Backup, and Disaster Recovery Plans: We would suggest besides scalability that high availability, data-backup, and disaster recovery plans should be important factors to consider when purchasing hardware and are a small price to pay in the long run for maintaining business continuity. When your environment for your document capture system is a pilot project with only a few users, a server crash won't create too much turmoil among the few users who are working on it. However, when an entire organization depends on the information and resources available on the data capture server, downtime has a significant cost. Having hardware that provides high availability - for instance up-time of 99% or better - will allow for peace of mind. And data back-up as well as disaster recovery plans will as well. Maybe you don't need all three at once, but you need to be aware of all three when budgeting and purchasing hardware for your data capture system.

We all know of projects that should have succeeded, could have succeeded, and might have succeeded but were bogged down with server problems. Without a well-planned server strategy at the core of your data capture system, any return on investment will be much harder to realize. You should plan on spending a lot of time choosing and setting up your server hardware strategy and you should make sure to budget appropriately, keeping in mind scalability and business continuity. You will find it much less expensive in the long run if you plan carefully. Make sure to purchase a server or servers that will perform reliably and will be scalable to support all the users, documents, and functionality that you anticipate your data capture system will handle over time.

Look for our next article on Third of Five Key Data Capture Implementation Mistakes: Not Choosing Wisely When Deciding on a Thick or Thin Client Solution.

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