Automating Data Capture of PDF & Images

It's always interesting to measure the metrics of how long something takes. Adding automation to a process not only saves time, but makes it less mentally taxing. This increases the sense of accomplishment and can make the process itself more gratifying.

I remember being at an amusement park and showing my kids how to measure the amount of time they might be in line by counting the amount of time it took between each time a roller coaster pulled in and how many people it accommodated. By then counting how many people were in line before them, they would know approximately how long they would be waiting.

This same type of thought process can be applied to any routine task within FileMaker. With the knowledge of the tools available, you can likely automate that task such that you reduce the total time it takes. That's the bulk of what we're doing when we're making software - simply reducing the amount of time it takes to do things.

In this video, I walk through the process of automating text capture from either a PDF or image files. FileMaker has built-in features on the Macintosh and it can certainly be accomplished within Windows as well. If there's anytime you're working with a PDF, PNG or JPG, then let's learn about the tools we have for automating the capture of data.

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