

Especially when dealing with many documents of the same type (Invoices, Purchase Orders, Shipping Notes, …), using a PDF Parser is a viable solution. More advanced techniques are based on regular expressions and pattern recognition.Īfter the initial training period, document data extraction systems offer a fast, reliable, and secure solution to convert PDF documents into structured data automatically. A simple method is, for example, Zonal OCR where the user simply defines specific locations inside the document with a point & click system. Most advanced solutions use different techniques to train the data extraction system.
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Outsourcing manual data entry comes with a lot of overhead. Data entry providers also use advanced technology to speed up the process the overall workflow is, however, basically the same as the one described above: opening every single document, selecting the right text area, and putting the data inside a database or a spreadsheet. To offer fast and cheap services, those companies employ armies of data entry clerks in low-income countries that do the heavy lifting. There are thousands of data entry providers out there you can hire. Outsourcing data entry is a huge business. Tabula does not include OCR engines, but it’s a good starting point if you deal with native PDF files (not scans).

Tabula will return a spreadsheet file which you probably need to post-process manually.
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You can also use Tabula’s free tool to extract table data from PDF files.

The process is simple: Open every document, select the text you want to extract, copy & paste to where you need the data.Įven when you want to extract table data, selecting the table with your mouse pointer and pasting the data into Excel will give you decent results in many cases. If you only have a couple of PDF documents, the fastest route to success can be manual copy & paste.
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How to extract data from a PDF Manually re-keying data from a handful of PDF documents
