What is Optional Character Recognition or OCR software?
It is a program that translates printed or typed text to a wordprocessing file. Some advanced programs can translate handwritten records, too.
This is not a perfect technology. Even with a clean page printed with a standard modern computer font, OCR software can often mistranslate. This requires careful proofreading and editing in the resulting word processing document. Single page documents where formatting is critical like resumes can be very frustrating to OCR since OCR has great difficulty with formatting columns, bullets and other features common to resumes.
There are situations where converting a document back to a word processing file does make sense in time and effort. Knowing that OCR is possible and how to do the basic procedure can be a great advantage.
All PC Plus computers should have the OCR program TextBridge Pro installed. If you have access to another software package you want to use that's fine but the instructions below are TextBridge Pro specific.
Make sure your scanner is turned on and connected. Open TextBridge Pro. Don't open your usual program for scanning.
For the AutoOCR option in Textbridge, there are three basic steps with options for each. As a first try, keep the options at
1. Get Page: Scan B&W
2. Perform OCR, Describe Original: Automatic
3. Export Results, How? : Save as File
For this challenge, get your Branch Emergency Notebook, take out p. 40 Sample Letter To Parent Regarding a Discipline Problem and put it facedown in your scanner. Click on the blue Start triangle.
Be patient. This kind of scanning can take a minute. Soon you should see your first OCR Proofreader box. Sometimes a word the software suspects is wrong is perfectly okay, so you click the Ignore button.
Sometimes the software is a little or a lot wrong in figuring out a word. This can be from a stray mark on the page, a bit of fancy font or formatting or other things but it is fixable. Retype what you really want in the Change to: box, then click on Change. The Change box won't be clickable until you've made an edit in the Change To: box..
When you have finished with all the Proofreader boxes, click on Finish. You can now name and save the Word document. Unfortunately, you aren't finished. Sometimes OCR makes problems that aren't shown to you in a Proofreader box. Very carefully read and edit your new Word document when you open it inside of Microsoft Word. In the example below, the software thought "OCL" was "OCT" and "Team, Jan. 2007" was "Teanz,Jan.,?007"
To complete the challenge, finish editing the letter in Microsoft Word as if you were really sending to a parent. Send the completed letter as an attachment to the Branch Managers Challenge Gmail account.
If you want to get creative and tailor the letter to the parents or guardians of a fictional character like Harry Potter, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan (discipline problems all) or any other character, I have a chocolate prize for the most creative submitted by the due date of August 28, 2009. Dark or Milk Chocolate, winner's choice!
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