Have you considered saving all of your family’s important documents and pictures in the computer as an archive? Would you like to have instant access, searchable in the computer on your network, to all of your important documents, including bills, wills, and any other written documentation that you may need access to now and in the future? OCR software could be your solution.
Have you considered saving all of your family’s important documents and pictures in the computer as an archive? Would you like to have instant access, searchable in the computer on your network, to all of your important documents, including bills, wills, and any other written documentation that you may need access to now and in the future? OCR software could be your solution.
Scanning pictures is something we take for granted in the modern world. People are posting pictures that were originally printed long before the internet age, using scanners and digital photo editing software, to their favorite social networks (like facebook, Google+, etc.). Did you know you can also use OCR software to get all of your documents into the computer?
Why Use OCR Software?
What is OCR software and why is it different from scanning a picture? While you can scan your documents to have a photograph version of them saved in the computer, the actual text itself is not being imported in text form into the computer. In other words, it is not editable or searchable.
This is fine if it’s just something sentimental or historical, like an old love letter in cursive from your grandmother to your grandfather or a marriage certificate. In fact, it is highly recommendable to make an actual picture-type scan of history-oriented documents, in addition to scanning the text in using OCR software.
What Does OCR Software Actually Do?
OCR software is best for scanning documents that were printed on a computer or typed out with a typewriter. It is not easy for this type of software to read handwriting unless it is extremely uniform and legible. However, for typewritten or printed documents, OCR software is ideal as an archiving method.
OCR stands for “optical character reader” or “optical character recognition.” Applications that use the OCR method scan the pages you place on your scanner and interpret any text that is found, importing it as editable text in a document (such as a word processor or other format).
OCR Also Saves Space and Encourages Organization
Another advantage of using OCR software to archive your family history is that it allows you to discard a substantial portion of your “paper trail,” as it were. Unless you are merely saving a particular document for its value in terms of posterity, scanning it in using OCR software allows you to keep a copy of the text without needing to retain the physical copy.
