How to Make Conference and Expo Flyers Searchable on Your Computer
In our Previous Article, Scan Those Flyers Before You Fly from Your Next Web Conference, we promised to provide you a tip that would help you save time if you took our advice and scanned conference flyers and information before you flew home (saving money on your baggage and saving all of us money on future flight prices).
So here’s the tip
When you scan those flyers in there are two simple tools that can make all of that information on those flyers indexable so that you can find it in a quick search from your computer without having to do a lot of work yourself.
The tools are OmniPage 16 and Google Desktop. Google Desktop is free and odds are you probably are already using it.
OmniPage 16 costs about $150, but can be extremely useful. It is basically an Optical Character Recognition program.
In the old days, you could run documents through a scanner and the OCR would convert those pdf images generated into text. These days in addition to generating a word or text document from a scanner, you can also do that with a digital camera!
The program recommends a digital camera of 5.0 megapixels, but I have generated text documents of 98% accuracy using a 3.2 megapixel Cannon elph. I do recommend a better camera, but if you have an older camera, just make sure your resolution is maxed out, and that you try and fill the image with the document or text.
These days there are even a few camera phones that are offering 5.0 megapixels, so you could potentially see a day, where you could snap the picture with your camera phone, email it to yourself and run the image through the OCR when ever you like.
TIP The program does have a great function that scans all the files in a bin. So if you hit a trade show and walk away with a few hundred pictures of flyers and things, just have your computer run through the files in a bin some night while you are sleeping!
This is also one of those tips that anyone that attends conferences can utilize. Web developers tend to be up on the latest software and technology, but this can work whether you work on the internet, or in consumer electronics or even if you are a drug rep attending the latest weight loss drug convention getting wired on Phentermine in between dinners wining and dining medical professionals.