Scanning Business Cards Using a ScanSnap !!!

English English
Steve Dotto here. How the heck are you this fine day? Me, I’m great because I’m back
in the office after an energizing conference that I was at last week. I was at Social Media
Camp Scanning Business Cards Using a ScanSnap !!! in Victoria. You know when you come back in the office how you’re all fired
up and just ready to go but you have so much data, so much to get out of your brain, so
many notes to transfer and business cards to transfer into your system and you just
want to get going? That’s what we’re going to look at today. We’re going to take a
look at starting with getting all of the business cards out of the business card form and into
digital form. So stick around. Today, we’re going to be taking a look at
converting all business cards into digital format and there are a lot of ways to do that.
business printing company We can use different scanners and different business card cameras on our smartphones which
is a great way to do things and those either use automated processors or sometimes real
people to enter the data so that we can easily migrate it into our Contact Manager. But I’m
going to try and throw some really good hardware at the situation today. I’ve got what many
people consider to be the Cadillac of scanning brands. I’ve got a Fujitsu ScanSnap. I’ve
got the mid-range scanner, the S1300i but I want to try and take the scanner and I want
to try and scan my cards and see what kind of accuracy I get and if it’s indeed an
efficient way to scan them all in. Now before we begin though, I do need to do
a quick shout out to people who make it possible for us to do these videos for you and that
is our community on Patreon. Dotto Tech is a crowdfunded community and the crowd gets
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maybe it’s something that you might want to take a look at, drop by our Patreon page.
There it describes exactly what it takes to become a Patreon supporter and the perks you
get as a result of your support. Now back to the conference. So I was going
to be super organized this conference because I know I was going to learn a lot. There were
so many good speakers and I knew I was just getting a lot of really valuable information.
So I went out and purchased a super notebook. This is not just any notebook. No, no, no.
This is the Moleskine Evernote edition. Everyone knows how I feel about Evernote so I thought
an Evernote edition of a notebook has to be totally awesome. So I bought this and we’re
going to be taking a look at it in an upcoming video, whether or not the moleskin Evernote
notebook keeps me more organized than a regular notebook would.
It turns out, though, I think maybe the most exciting part of this notebook was a very
simple feature that I discovered in the back of the notebook. They’ve got a pouch and
this pouch was awesome because all my receipts and all the business cards and little bits
of information I collected through the conference, I just tucked into that pouch so it was all
there in one place when I got home as opposed to being in multiple pockets, multiple shirt
pockets, multiple bags and folded into multiple places. So just the organizational factor
of carrying a pouch with me, like Steve the Kangaroo, was incredibly valuable.
All right, so I’ve got all these business cards now ready to input into the scanner.
I’m ready to start scanning it. Now the challenge that scanners have in this day and
age is people are so fancy and graphical with their business cards that scanners quite often
have a big challenge and I think in a lot of cases that you kind of need the human eye
looking at it in order to decipher the information. But the ScanSnap is really highly thought
of so if anything is going to be able to do it automatically, it’s this box here.
So I’ve started off the software. I have to launch the ScanSnap Manager which is what
drives the scanner and then they include with the scanner this piece of software here which
is called Cardiris which is the reading software. It’s basically OCR software that will take
the images as we scan them in and it will convert it hopefully into the correct fields
so that we can then export it into our Contact Manager of choice. In my case, that will be
Google Contacts. In your case, it may well be Outlook.
I am going to scan in the cards. Now I hope that it just lets me process the cards. It
goes through. Here comes the first one. It’s just a blank back side and it doesn’t have
a lot of information. But it sees it. Good. The only thing is it’s set the country to
United States. I might be able to make the preference Canada, for defaulting to Canada.
It looks like it did a pretty good job on that. Now that was, to be fair, a fairly straightforward
music card. Let’s see how it does in the next one which
is a wee more graphically more complicated card. We’ll put that in. Now there’s a
nice little alignment too here to allow you to feed these through. As soon as I put the
business card into the scanner, I just hit the button and it scans it in and it. Okay,
so it’s rotated in the correct direction. Okay, it doesn’t have any of the right information
in the top area but that’s okay I can go through it and I’m going to clean up. So
I keep the cards kind of in the same order that IвЂ˜m scanning them in and I’m just
going to go through. I’m going to keep moving. Now it’s going to stay busy. I’m going
to keep moving as individuals go. I’m going to have to do a lot of blurring here to make
sure all the personal information isn’t getting out.
So that one there, is it going to rotate it? No. So here it wasn’t able to rotate it.
It says okay, I’ve got to verify it as a business card first. It wasn’t able to recognize
the text. That was completely understandable why it was not able to recognize that text.
But let’s actually delete that because we don’t need that one. That’s just the back
side with no contact information. Here’s all of the person’s contact info. So let’s
choose the card and let’s rotate it. I think I’m going to have to rotate it to the right.
Now it’s lined up, does it automatically read? See now it’s not scanning in the reversed
card. Isn’t that interesting? Okay, I’ll play with that. I’ll continue to play with
that and we’ll give you a report on that in the end.
Let’s go with the vertical format part. This one here’s a little bit different.
Let’s see how it does on this one. There’s the vertical one. Okay, it confused the person’s
name with New Media but I actually don’t see the person’s name here. Again, here’s
what I’m starting to get a feel for. These card scanners do a great job, I think, as
well as they can. I have a feeling that the ScanSnap is building its reputation on more
receipt scanning than business card scanning just because of the vagaries of business card
scanning that looking at some of the camera-based services that allow us to take photos, take
images and have real people look at it and decipher the information might well be the
way to go. Looking at this one here, this person’s
in Toronto. I believe they’re in Toronto. They went GTA, GVA. Well, somebody lives here
where I live, I live in Vancouver and I can tell you right now and maybe only people in
Toronto and Vancouver are going to recognize these acronyms. GVA is Greater Vancouver Area
and GTA is the Greater Toronto Area. I can also tell is by the area codes.
But how is a piece of software going to know that? I mean really. So these scanners, well
they are awesome for receipts, which I have tested them for in the past and they do an
amazing job on receipts. At this point, a little bit disappointing on the business card
front. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to recommend it. But I’ll be able to tell
you a lot better as I go through it more. Again, it’s unable to recognize so it’s
becoming a fairly labor intensive process. I’m going to rotate this one in but I’m
holding out on no hope that it’s going to read it because it’s another one of the
reversed pieces of text and it seems to be having issues. Yes, it’s not automatically
populating whereas the other ones, it’s populated information in where it’s found
it. So I’m going to finish this off. I will
give a pause on the video, I will come back and I will give you a synopsis of the importing
of the data but it looks to me like it’s going to be fairly labor intensive even using
the scanner itself which is, I’ve got to admit, a little bit disappointing. But hey,
that’s why we do these videos. That’s why we test this product. It’s not all going
to be just a walk in the park. Sometimes, technology just doesn’t do what we hope
or want it to do and I know it’s not the Fujitsu’s fault. The ScanSnap is rated in
every estimation as the premium business scanner on the market but some tasks are even beyond
even it so we will do it. This is motivating me to take a look at some of the other services
as well as we move along. Having said that, I’m going to take a quick break. When we
come back I will give you a summary of what I found as far as finishing off this project
and I’m signing off. Stick around. All right, I’ve entered ten cards and I’ve
also had lunch so don’t look at my time stamp to understand how long it’s taking
me. But I have to say that at this point here, I’m not certain that with the subtleties
of modern business cards that this is the best way to do things. This card here, for
example, came in fantastically, Ryan MacKenzie, came in fantastically. Every other one, I
had to massage the information in so much that I think I would have been faster just
typing from scratch, maybe a little bit less fast but still it wasn’t outstanding.
Having said that, if you do use it, if you have little more success than I’ve had at
this point here it becomes very, very cool because now what I can do is take this entire
collection of cards from here to here, all ten cards—I thought I met more people there
but I guess that wasn’t very much—and export them all into this case here vCard
format. Here we go. There I’ve got them exported as vCards onto my Desktop and now
what I’m going to do is leap over into my Contacts.
This is one area that Google Contacts really works nicely. I’m going to import that collection
of cards into Google Contacts and when I do that it creates a date stamp on the cards.
It looks at all of the individuals as a card as a group and so what we’ll have is here
in my Contacts will be the latest date. It will be, there it is, imported by
there are the ten cards right there all imported together. When I do that now, I have to verify
them but now I can send an email to everybody who I met at this camp at the same time, just
sending them in my information and saying how good it was to meet them. I can create
a little mail list. I know where I met them, I know because it’s all together and I’m
able to do that all at once. I really like that feature. I think that’s very, very
cool. Overall, I’d have to say that I think we’re
going to find better methods for importing business cards. Having said, that I know the
ScanSnap is an outstanding tool for business scanning, for scanning in receipts and other
documents so let’s not look at this as an indictment of its capability, more a comment
as to the artistic freedoms that most people are taking now, designing their business cards
and it might give you pause for thought when you design that next business card, about
making it very easy for someone to be able to import it into their Contact Manager which
is very important of course. That does bring us to the end of this video.
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in. With that, I am done. I’m Steve Dotto. Have fun storming the castle! *** ***