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Participant
July 27, 2022
Question

Need help with extracting data from a scanned form

  • July 27, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 2763 views

My office has collected thousands of paper forms from customers.  The forms were all physically scanned and saved into one large pdf document. Each page of this document  is one distinct form.  Is there a way that I can extract certain data points from each page of this document (Customer Name, Employer, email address) and export the data into an excel file?

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2 replies

radzmar
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 31, 2022

For this tasks there are specialized OCR tools available at the market such as ScannerVision. Those allow to define to scan certain areas of scanned documents for specific data to execute predefined workflows. Acrobat isn't able to such things.

AkanchhaS8194121
Legend
July 31, 2022

Hi Jane,

Hope you are doing well.

 

 Is there a way that I can extract certain data points from each page of this document (Customer Name, Employer, email address) and export the data into an excel file?

 

This would have been much easier if it was supposed to be extracted from a Fillable PDF form or if it was an interacting form and distributed via Adobe Acrobat. 

 

However, it's a Scanned paper form, so we can try it by converting it to an interactive PDF form using Adobe Acrobat. To do that,

  • Choose Tools > Prepare Form.

  • Once done, click More> Export data> You can export form data as an FDF file, an XFDF file, an XML file, or a text file. 
  • Enter a name for the file and the folder where you want to store the data file.
  • Click the Save as Type drop-down arrow and select the file format you want to use.
  • Click Save.

Note: This may or may not give you an accurate result, as it's initially a paper form. 

 

Thanks,

Akanchha