Need some software help/guidance

[GT98]

Ok I just got back from a GF friends that needed some computer help (ok alot of help) and she was asking me about converting over her Paper documents to an easily accessable computer based one. She works in Real Estate and does the searches on properties for Title Agencies etc.

So the thing I'm looking at is getting anywhere from 5 pages to 50 pages of material scanned in, combining it to make it easily accessable and then taking all this data and making it into a data base that she can access.

Overall it sounds pretty labor intestive to me and I don't have the foggest on what would be the best/simpliest way to approach it since I would like to have my coustomer do the grunt work for. Anyone have any suggestions on where I could look or use?

[az]

I don't think any OCR (optical character recognition) software is capable of recognising and then entering the appropriate fields into a database, or even recognising characters reliable enough for business use - you'd still have to edit it manually, costing you as much time as if you had entered it manually, while saving you the hassle of scanning it all. If it's hand-written, then forget about scanning anyway...

AZ

[Ali]

I would say go to your local University or Technical Collage.

Most of those seem to have students looking for projects to do.

Around here we have a course where part of the 3rd year requirements is to develope a comercial quality product for a client.

Its free for the client, although the Uni keeps the IP rights to sell it if they want.

That way you get some poor sap of a student doing all the grunt work for you, and if it doesnt work, then you dont loose at all.

Ali