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Social Bookmark This Page By Clicking One Of The Links Below OCR Scanning Services or Data Entry? by New York Document Scanning Spending lots of money on OCR Software and still not getting the results you want? What is OCR (Optical Character Recognition)? OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the process that recognizes the printed words on paper documents and outputs to an editable documents like Microsoft Word, Excel, PDF Normal, or Text. OCR is generally used when the documents are good quality printed pages and is usually highly accurate for typed manuscripts and text documents. Accuracy on poor quality photocopies, dirty or hand-annotated documents will be substantially lower. "OCR programs do not have the same high level of accuracy as retyping documents like lease agreements, technical manuals, medical papers and documents with columns and tables, spreadsheets and graphics. A service bureau with an offshore data entry office can provide manual retying at favorable rates." What are the disadvantages of OCR? 1) No OCR software is 100% accurate. 2) The accuracy of conversion depends on the quality of the original. 3) OCR correction is very labor intensive. 4) OCR on spreadsheets tends to produce a high rate of errors in the OCR conversion compared to text documents. The inaccuracy of OCR on poor quality documents negates any labor savings by the automated process due to time consuming manual character corrections. A data entry service is your best solution for converting poor quality documents. Manual data entry (keyed-in) of poor quality documents provides a high level of accuracy not provided in OCR applications. Manual data entry is widely used for mailing lists and 'excel' spreadsheet type documents as well. Scanning and keying from paper to image is significantly more cost-effective than OCR due to the advantage of lower costs offshore. With lower wages (employees make a decent living in India) and high quality work, outsourcing gives you fast turnaround of your project and cost savings. OCR or Data Entry: Should I convert my documents with a data entry service? Generally, an in-house investment in a document scanner and software starts at $5,000 and the higher end models are very expensive (above $30,000). Of course, there is a cost associated with this option as well--labor. Utilizing a Scanning Company with offshore data entry facilities reduces costs and provides higher accuracy for poor quality documents. It generally should cost 1 cent per field to manually enter a mailing list or an excel spreadsheet from a paper copy. About the author New York Document Scanning, a global outsourcing company, is headquartered in New York, NY with offices in Kolkata, India and provides ocr scanning services and data entry at low cost. Get free quotes for all your document scanning needs. Visit us at http://www.new-york-document-scanning.com