Can I use Access (2007) for sorting scanned documents?

"M Skabialka" wrote in
:

Actually I haven't scanned the documents yet, one of our
departments has these paper documents and wants me to create a
database so they can scan them and track them and go paperless.

In my experience, this is a fool's errand. I was involved in a
project of this type more than ten years ago using a commercial
document management program and a hardware budget of 10s of
thousands (for one PC and its scanner and supporting hardware!), and
it was abandoned after they found out how much damned work it was to
both scan and categorize documetns in a way that would allow them to
be usefully retrieved.

They paid a huge restocking fee when they returned all the hardware.

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/

"Arvin Meyer [MVP]" wrote in
:

As others have mentioned, you need something that's searchable.
PDFs, at least some of them, are searchable. Access doesn't read
directly from a PDF, but other applications do and some of them
*might* be accessible through automation. There is a PDF to Word
converter:

http://www.nuance.com/pdfconverter/

that might do the job, but I'd call and ask them first.

But if it's just a scanned image that hasn't been OCR'd, it won't be
text searchable.

And if you have to OCR it, it has to be proofed. Obviously the level
of this is much higher than it once was (if it weren't Google Books
couldn't exits), but it's still not perfect.

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/

What Uncle Sam wants, Uncle Sam gets!

"David W. Fenton" wrote in message
.89...
"M Skabialka" wrote in
:

Actually I haven't scanned the documents yet, one of our
departments has these paper documents and wants me to create a
database so they can scan them and track them and go paperless.

In my experience, this is a fool's errand. I was involved in a
project of this type more than ten years ago using a commercial
document management program and a hardware budget of 10s of
thousands (for one PC and its scanner and supporting hardware!), and
it was abandoned after they found out how much damned work it was to
both scan and categorize documetns in a way that would allow them to
be usefully retrieved.

They paid a huge restocking fee when they returned all the hardware.

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/

I had planned to use a hyperlink. The path to the document, plus its name
should give a fairly accurate description of what should be in the document,
these are documents supporting products, and the folders they are stored
under will categorize the documents based on the product. The users don't
want to open Explorer and start wending their way through multiple folders
to find a document if they can select a key word or two, find the document,
link to it and open it.
I have a database which does this with digitized technical drawings but can
import a pre-generated text file describing what is in the folder so the
user doesn't need to generate any keywords. e.g. They select Drawing No
123-456, it lists all the sheets to the drawing and the revision number.
They make a selection and click on a hyperlink to the actual drawing which
opens in the appropriate application. It's location is completely
transparent to the user.

"John W. Vinson" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 9 Apr 2008 16:32:43 -0500, "M Skabialka"

wrote:

I think I may have to create a table of 'Keywords' and link this to the
document table. Someone will have to go into this table on a subform for
each document and create keywords or tags to describe the document. Then
later they can look for all documents with that tag.
Or maybe a TreeView of the Explorer path from Windows..? I haven't tried
this before, and the folder structure could get pretty deep...

You might want to consider storing a Hyperlink field pointing to the
document
itself. A three table structure might be appropriate:

Documents
DocID
DocLocation hyperlink
Title
other fields specific to the document

Keywords
Keyword Text, Primary Key

DocKeywords
DocID
Keyword

You could fill in keywords using a subform with a combo box to select
existing
keywords, and use the combo's Not In List event to add new keywords as
needed.
--

John W. Vinson [MVP]

You can avoid scanning documents if you save the document to a file when it
is created. Hopefully you still have the 2000 documents as a file. Then all
you need are two simple tables something like:

TblDocumentKeyword
DocumentKeywordID
DocumentID
DocumentKeyword

TblDocument
DocumentID
DocumentName
DocumentFileName

and a form to enter documents as they are created and a search facility on
this form for locating documents.

Steve

"martin gifford" wrote in message
...
Hi,
I've decided to create a paperless office.
I've scanned about 2000 documents to jpeg files.
Now I want to sort them and cross reference them according to topics.
Is Access 2007 a good tool for this purpose?
If so, is there any good online guides available to show how it can be
done
for this purpose?
Any quick tips? (I've used Access a tiny bit a long time ago, but I could
get up to speed quickly.)
Thanks,
Martin Gifford.

"David W. Fenton" wrote in message
.89...
"Arvin Meyer [MVP]" wrote in
:

As others have mentioned, you need something that's searchable.
PDFs, at least some of them, are searchable. Access doesn't read
directly from a PDF, but other applications do and some of them
*might* be accessible through automation. There is a PDF to Word
converter:

http://www.nuance.com/pdfconverter/

that might do the job, but I'd call and ask them first.

But if it's just a scanned image that hasn't been OCR'd, it won't be
text searchable.

And if you have to OCR it, it has to be proofed. Obviously the level
of this is much higher than it once was (if it weren't Google Books
couldn't exits), but it's still not perfect.

Not all PDFs are scanned images. PDFs made from text documents or made by
printing to a PDF printer can be searched just like the original text, at
least with the Foxit PDF reader that I use.:

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rea...own_reader.htm
--
Arvin Meyer, MCP, MVP
http://www.datastrat.com
http://www.mvps.org/access
http://www.accessmvp.com

"Arvin Meyer [MVP]" wrote in
:


"David W. Fenton" wrote in message
.89...
"Arvin Meyer [MVP]" wrote in
:

As others have mentioned, you need something that's searchable.
PDFs, at least some of them, are searchable. Access doesn't read
directly from a PDF, but other applications do and some of them
*might* be accessible through automation. There is a PDF to Word
converter:

http://www.nuance.com/pdfconverter/

that might do the job, but I'd call and ask them first.

But if it's just a scanned image that hasn't been OCR'd, it won't
be text searchable.

And if you have to OCR it, it has to be proofed. Obviously the
level of this is much higher than it once was (if it weren't
Google Books couldn't exits), but it's still not perfect.

Not all PDFs are scanned images.

Well, of course not. But I thought the OP said it was all scanned
images. Hence my remark "if it's just a scanned image that hasn't
been OCR'd...".

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/