I am a nurse and do the medication records at work. We got new computers today and the files are *lost*. I need to be able to make these records and the only way I know how (but I don't know how) is to scan them into Word format (maybe) and then edit them? Is this possible? The only options I have when scanning is to save something as jpeg, tiff, bmp. Am I shooting in the dark?
Christy, you need an OCR (optical character recognition) program. It will scan the document, and the identify paragraphs so it can identify the characters. These programs usually work the best with plain text. It may be real jumbled if you have a form with a lot of lines, etc. Best thing to do is try one and see, sometimes they scan such a mess that it is easier to type them in than to edit them. Try cnet.com in the download section and search for ocr and you'll probably find something. Good luck.
My software that came with the scanner had OCR. Check and be sure you don't have it - before you first start to scan, instead of default setting, see if there is a "text" option.
I just looked - mine has options like "black and white photo" "color photo" "fax or filing" and "text."
Graphic file like jpeg, tiff, bmp are large compared to text files and require lots of computer space. Also, they do not allow for ease of edting. Unless you simply need a computer copy of a document perhaps you need to look at something like microsoft access. This is a database that would let you record various information for each record (or patient) and is searchable on several different fields. For example, name, date, medication type, etc.
