Before I go on about whether or not to OCR your scanned documents, let us talk about what exactly OCR is.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR), takes your image, for instance, your PDF, and converts all written words into encoded text. Which will then make it possible to search for text throughout the PDF or image.
Most of the time companies will charge a little extra to make their files OCRed because of how time intensive the task is as of right now. With that being said this is where you want to ask yourself is it beneficial for us to pay a little more for OCRed files and the answer is…… it depends.
You’ve got to ask yourself the following questions….
1. What will we be exactly doing with these documents?
2. Will we be using these documents on a regular basis?
3. Are the documents organized already?
4. How many pages are there in a PDF batch?
5. Do we need to find keywords throughout the document?
6. What industry are you in?
If you are in the legal industry we always suggest going in the OCR direction. In the medical industry we don’t see the need to use OCR as much.
Once it is time for document scanning, these questions will help you decide what you should do. You will always be able to go back and OCR them if you change your mind. So the question is do you need your scanned files OCRed?