Converting OmniForm to FileMaker

[Bigun]

In my agency, OmniForm was used for practically everything. Since then the simple 'filler' version of the program is no longer being offered, and licenses for a full version are being offered at 99$ a pop. We've called and asked them questions about purchasing a site license (twice) and they never called back. The last program update was issued in 2005. The writing is on the wall: OmniForm is being dropped.

So now I have about 15 divisions and about 100+ OmniForm files to convert to FileMaker. To make things worse, each OmniForm file can have multiple pages. Each page can take upwards of about 2+ hours to convert (and thats not including porting all the saved form data into the FileMaker's database).

Overall, without some mechanism to convert these files, I'm looking at *several* months of man-hours to convert.

Does anyone know of a solution to convert OmniForm files to FileMaker?

At the very least, can offer some time saving advice?

[Bigun]

I've created a topic on this forum concerning migrating from OmniForm to FileMaker. No responses have been given.

So now I am stuck with another issue stemming from this program: how to OCR forms and have the fields recognized and put in.

Is there such a plugin for FileMaker 11?

(Also, I apologize if this is the incorrect category to post this topic, but it seems the third-party support sub-forums only seemed to cover barcodes and accounting)

[BrentHedden]

As far as I'm aware, there is no plugin for OCR recognition.

Probably due to the fact that even the best OCR software gives "somewhat acceptable" performance at best. Or at least from my experience. So it must be a real challenge to program it correctly.

The best help that I can find is this -

http://help.filemaker.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/859/~/importing-a-%28.txt%29-text-file-into-a-single-field-and-performing-a-search-on-the

Which pretty much means you've got to already have the OCR software spit out the textfile before importing.

[Bigun]

Even still, it doesn't create the form boxes for you.

*sigh*

The next year is going to be a long hard road for my department.

[supernatural]

This may helps. Convert all forms (or Print) to PDF and use the following plug-in to read into Filemaker

http://www.360works.com/filemaker-pdf-plugin/

[comment]

When you say "convert" - do you mean get the structure (field names) or the layout? Or both?

Since it seems no one here is familiar with OmniForm, it's up to you to explore and post here what types of export it provides.

[fseipel]

Omniform supports export to CSV, tab delimited, dBase, Excel, and several other file formats, and supports ODBC. This is a rather dated PC program.

Filemaker will create a new file automatically, with the data and field names upon import. The layouts (which fields display on screen/printer, and where they display) will not come in; I'd suggest pasting an Omniform screen shot into Filemaker's layout, and superimposing the fields over this. That should give you an approximately correct form (CTRL+ALT+PRTSC), after which, you can delete the screen shot backdrop. This requires minimal tech expertise, so clerical staff can do it. You may want to tweak results for data validation, auto-fill, etc.

So this shouldn't take long if you have, say, an invoice form with 200 entries and a receiving form with 500 entries, but if you have 20 or 50 different form types, then it will be time-consuming because you are going to have to come up with numerous layouts. If all the divisions used the same forms, then you will simply import the files exported from Omniform Filler version, into the same FM database successively. You may want to consider whether you want to build a relational database from the forms, and how to handle duplicate entries if they exist.

[Bigun]

You may actually have something there. OmniForm can export to fillable PDF. Is there something that can convert PDF to a FileMaker form?

[Bigun]

OmniForm is a hybrid mix of OCR, fillable form, and database.

The database portion can be extracted into multiple forms and is a non-issue.

The real issue is the form structure itself.

As the last reply is suggesting, I can use a screenshot as a backdrop and at least make the conversion a little less painful.