We Lawyers spend, so much time in typing.
And it’s quite irritating when you have to type it in the computer from a physical copy…just because you don’t have a soft copy of it.
But, what if I tell you that this ‘hours of typing’ can be reduced to a few mins of work??
This blog post will tell you a method, through which you can save your time from such unnecessary typing work using an app named ‘CamScanner’.
Once it happened, I was reading some judgement in my office and my colleague came and stood beside me with a bunch a documents…around 20 to 30 pages.
And told me that “Sir, has told you to type this.”
I asked “all of it??” he said “yes..”
To which I said…but why? Can’t we tell those people who typed this document to just email us the soft copy?
He said “No, we can’t…”
And I was screwed up…. I spent few hours typing the whole thing.
Then one day I came to know about CamScanner and its OCR feature in the app.
So, next time when such incident happened again.
I just took my mobile, scanned the document.
And using the OCR feature completed the whole thing in less than half of the time which I would have required, if I would have kept on typing everything.
HOW did I do that??
CamScanner is free app used to scan physical documents and make them into pdf files.
Yes, you don’t need a big scanner now, this app can scan your documents and get the work done.
And once you scan the document, there are many filters available, using those filters one will not even come to know that this file is scanned using an app and not a big scanner.
CamScanner has many other features, among which is the Optical Character Recognition feature(OCR).
When you want to scan a document, you have to first click an image of it through the App.
After that, the app converts that image into a pdf file.
After the pdf file is ready, you can see a button below named OCR, click over there.
As the name of the feature suggests… Optical Character Recognition.
It recognizes all the characters (i.e. text of the document) present in the pdf.
So, you can also call it “Text recognition”.
It will take a few seconds to recognize the text of the document. It depends on how big is the document.
After this recognition process is over, you can copy the text anywhere you want.
You can copy it in a word document in your mobile or email it to someone or just copy and paste it in a document you created in Google Docs.
After that, you can copy all the text from there and prepare your draft. This method will take less time.
I followed this same process, using this OCR tool of CamScanner.
Then, I copied all the text and pasted it in my Google Docs mobile app. Because, I make all my documents & drafts in Google Docs, as it has more advantages.
After that, I just opened my Google Docs on the computer.
Made some changes which were required, edited it and the work was done. Completed it in less than half of the time which would have been required, if I would have kept typing all of it….for around hours.
CamScanner also has some more features available with the paid version.
You can also, check out those features too.
But, if you want to just use it for free then you can follow this method which I told you here.
Important Tip
I would also like to tell you that, once you have taken the image, the OCR tool recognizes the text from that IMAGE.
So, your image, the picture you take of the document from your mobile camera must be good. It must be very clear.
If it is not clear, then the characters are not recognized properly, and the text which you get contains spelling mistakes and many other errors, like 1 becomes I, b becomes d, etc.
But, from my experience I would say that even if the image is clear, there will be SOME errors…it will not be exactly the same as the document you have in your hand.
So, you have to edit the document and remove those errors and correct the document. This takes a little bit of time.
But, it is WAY better than typing each and every word of that document, isn’t it?
Using this method surely saves time.
