When you need to scan the same type of document many times, using such a template will save you the time manually updating column values for each scanned and uploaded document.
Zonal OCR templates can also include a document separator, which is needed when you bulk-scan multiple documents and want each to be saved to SharePoint as a separate file, without the need to insert blank pages between you papers.
Creating a Zonal OCR template
To create a new property-mapping template (Zonal OCR template) follow the steps hereunder:
- Scan a page for which you wish to create a template. example: a price quote.
In the "Edit Settings & Scan" dialog, select "Scan into multiple files" option, as appears in the screenshot below:
Click "Scan" to start scanning, once scanning is done you'll see the Scan client preview window.
- In the Scan Client window, click the "Map Properties" button:
- The Map Properties editor will open:
On the left side you see your scanned document and on the right side your mapped library columns (by default none).
To map your columns, click the "Add a column" button and select a column:
After you select a column, you will see a highlighted area on the top-left corner of the document. Now drag that area to cover the zone which displays the value you want to be extracted for that column. In our example we mapped an area showing the Account ID, to the "Account" column:
Click the "Read As" dropdown for the "Account" mapped column to select the format of that mapped value: Alphanumeric (text), Number or Barcode.
Continue to map all other columns to their matching regions on the scanned page.
- When finished mapping all library columns, click "Extract Values" button to run the OCR engine and extract the mapped areas to their matching library columns:
You will see the extracted values for each of the mapped columns.
- To save this property mapping template click "Rename Template" to give it the preferred name and then click "Save Template".
You can save the template on your local desktop for your own usage, or in the list settings - in that case it will be available to other users that need this template to scan same types of documents.
- If you have just one OCR template in your library - it will automatically become the default template.
If you have more than one template - you can choose which one should be the default one.
Using existing property-mapping template
When you have a default OCR template configured for your SharePoint library, it will be used when users scan pages without requiring them to select it.
When end-user selects "Edit settings & scan" option, the default Zonal OCR template will be selected by default:
Clicking "Scan" will scan the pages and then run the select Zonal OCR template.
In our example, we scanned 3 price quote pages:
Comment: This might take a while, depending on the number of the scanned pages.
To save the scanned file/s click "Upload & Save".
This will upload all scanned documents to your SharePoint library, and will also update all mapped library columns with the extracted values: