How Does OCR Make Office Work Easier?

October 17, 2023

How Does OCR Make Office Work Easier? Document Management in 2023

Optical character recognition (OCR) technology has transformed the way we manage documents, providing a variety of advantages that can boost efficiency and productivity significantly. It has grown in importance as a tool for businesses of all kinds. Continue reading to find out why your company needs OCR technology.

Learn more about how OCR technology can make your office work easier and what its benefits are.

But first, let’s look at what OCR is.

Key Takeaways: How OCR Makes Office Work Easier

  1. Improved document organization: OCR technology helps convert physical documents into digital formats, enabling efficient storage, organization, and retrieval of important files.
  2. Enhanced search capabilities: By converting text into machine-readable format, OCR enables quick and easy keyword search across multiple documents, saving time and effort.
  3. Streamlined data extraction: OCR simplifies extracting relevant data from documents, such as invoices or forms, allowing for seamless integration into databases, spreadsheets, or other software.
  4. Reduced manual data entry: By automatically converting text from documents, OCR reduces the need for manual data entry, minimizing errors and increasing productivity.
  5. Increased accessibility: OCR-generated digital documents can be easily shared, accessed, and edited by multiple users, fostering collaboration and remote work capabilities.
  6. Support for multiple languages: Advanced OCR systems can recognize and process text in multiple languages, making it easier to work with international documents and clients.
  7. Eco-friendly and cost-effective: The transition from paper-based to digital documents reduces paper usage, storage costs, and environmental impact, making offices more sustainable and cost-efficient.
  8. Enhanced security and compliance: Digital documents created through OCR can be encrypted and protected with access controls, ensuring the security of sensitive information and meeting regulatory requirements.
  9. Ease of integration: OCR technology can be seamlessly integrated into existing office systems, such as document management solutions and enterprise software, enhancing overall workflow efficiency.
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What is OCR?

OCR (optical character recognition) is a technology that converts images of typed or handwritten text into a machine-readable text. It's used in image to text online converters to extract text from scanned documents and photos. For example, if you scan any office document, like a receipt or form, your computer will save the scan file as an image file.

Optical Character Recognition

It is a great technology that was introduced in 1974 by a famous computer scientist, Ray Kurzweil. It was discovered to help blind and visually impaired people to read printed text, but nowadays, it is used in every field. Whether it is a business, office work, or any field, OCR technology is majorly used in printers and scanner machines, which every office has in their workspace. Also, now you could easily extract text from image or scanned PDF image and store it into Excel using OCR from this website that offers free OCR image to excel converter for free.

So, here we will show you some advantages of OCR technology that can make your office work easier.

Let’s discuss them.

How is OCR Technology Beneficial in Office Work?

Here are some benefits of OCR technology for offices.

1.  Helps to Save Important Documents

Important documents or files are the most crucial thing that an office or business has. It can be a file of any client, documents of any project, or any other piece of paper that is valuable to the company or office.

Saving them manually in office closets or cabins can increase the risk of losing them. But with the help of OCR, you can easily store important documents digitally in your office account.

Store Documents Remotely

The other benefit of saving important files digitally is that anyone in the office can easily get access to the file and read it or use any information that they want. 

2.  Helps in Storing Receipts Digitally

Among the different documents that are typically used in an office, receipts can be particularly tricky and difficult to manage due to their small sizes as well as the number of intricate details they usually contain.

Store Receipts Digitally

OCR can help in managing receipts properly i.e., by presenting all the numbers and figures on them in an easily readable and editable manner. Plus, since the data can be saved digitally, losing the original slips themselves isn’t that hazardous.

Plus, from all the types of documents that we could’ve picked out, we specifically picked receipts due to the simple fact that they are very important when it comes to proving a purchase or showing proof of reception. Considering the role receipts play in organisations, saving them digitally can be a huge benefit of OCR tools.

3.  Saves the Cost of Manual Data Entry Specialists

OCR can also make office work easier since they save you the cost of hiring data entry clerks and specialists for digitising documents. Instead of hiring, managing, and paying a data entry clerk, you can simply use OCR and digitise your documents in seconds and minutes.

Saves the Cost of Manual Data Entry Specialists

Plus, OCR also lowers the risk – and hence the expense – of missing, misplaced, or stolen data - which are some situations that human data entry specialists can be prone to end themselves in.

Which OCR Tools are Best for Office Work?

Finding and choosing a good tool for office work is the hardest and most time-taking task. We all know that hundreds of tools are developed in every niche or industry. And it is the same in the OCR tool field.

We have already discussed above that OCR tools or software are used to extract the text from the image and convert it into a machine-readable format. But here, we are going to explore some of the best tools that utilise advanced OCR technology and are available for free.

After doing a lot of research, we have listed the five best OCR tools that are available for free and can be easily used to extract text from your business documents, papers, or images.

  1. Image to Text Converter (https://www.imagetotext.info/)
  2. OCR Image to text (https://www.ocr.best/image-to-text)
  3. Convertio OCR (https://convertio.co/ocr/)
  4. OCR tool by Docsumo (https://www.docsumo.com/free-tools/online-ocr-scanner)
  5. IMG2GO (https://www.img2go.com/convert-to-document)

All the above-mentioned tools are developed by using OCR and are available for free. You can use this tool to make your office work easier and save your documents on your server or office computers.

Conclusion

In this post, we have talked about how OCR makes office work easier. We have discussed the problem and consequences that businesses or offices might face due to their documents and recruiting data.

But with the help of OCR, you can easily get rid of all the problems or issues. You can easily scan your documents or office papers and save them on your server or network.

Also, you can save your office or business from inside threats that can negatively affect your reputation. In the end, we have also listed some best software that utilises advanced OCR technology and detects the text from images accurately.

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