How to make a document of scanned checks searchable
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I'm doing end-of-year bookkeeping and I need to be able to search PDF's that are made up of checks that were scanned directly to the bank for deposit, then the PDF is sent to be to reconcile. However, when I use "search" it never returns anything. I've tried doing the OCR thing but it takes forever and it would literally take days to get it to scan all of the documents I have because it's such a slow process.
Is there any other setting or something I can do to make this possible? I didn't know that Adobe PDF's aren't really searchable if the items you're trying to search are images with words on them.
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Hi Knsap,
You are correct, if the check is just a picture of a check, there's nothing to read.
In addition, if there are written words, cannot be translated with OCR.
HOWEVER, if everything in the check printed, no handwriting there is a way.
First make all the separate PDF-checks into one PDF-check. You can do this by combining them all into one check. If you want you can break them into weeks, months, or the year. Keep in mind that if you have twelve documents (one for each month), you'll have to do twelve searches.
Now, open that document (you'll have to do this part separately for each document).
Now, select the "Scan & OCR" work tab, click on the dropdown menu for Recognize Text, and finally tap the Recognize Text button.
Now when you search for words, you'll be searching in all of the checks in that document.
Here's where I dump some water on this parade: Depending on how the scan was done, there can be considerable variabilities to the quality of the resultant OCR. Simply, the worse the quality of the scan, the worse the quality of the OCR. There's no use doing a search for "Joe's Business" if the text was understood to be "Joes Busmess." (Letter combinations like "in" often come out as "m." If the bank did the scanning, I can guarantee that that they did not scan with the intent for quality OCR. Rather, they scanned for the record of the scan. If it's anything like the scanned checks I get from my bank, I wouldn't even try to OCR them.
Sorry, good luck.
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