They hire low cost (~$4 to $6/hour as of 2019) data entry operators who would manually open each file and then type the corresponding data in excel.
If you need to parse data from pdf files on a regular basis, you can try and outsource the whole process to data entry providers in a country like India. For tables, you can use Tabula which is an open source software. If you have text based PDF files, you should be able to copy and paste most of the text. If you have only a few PDF files and this is a one time task, the best option is to type it out yourself or find a virtual assistant on Upwork to do it for you.
There are 3 main options - manually enter data, outsource to data entry BPO or use an automated data extraction software such as Docsumo. This has led to the rise of advanced computer vision and deep learning softwares (including our software Docsumo) that try to classify data as key-value pairs, tables and entities. In both PDF and images, the information about what the data represents needs to be interpreted in order to convert it into a structured format. In the case of scanned pdf and images, the character level data is also lost and needs to be recovered using OCR which is never 100% accurate. The problem is even more complicated when it comes to images (PNG or JPG) or images converted to PDF format. “Invoice No: 12345” where “Invoice No” represents the “invoice_number_key” and “12345” represents “invoice_number_value”). A PDF file stores characters without any information of what that data represents (eg. The main issue is that a PDF document carries no markup or hierarchy of data. Why is extracting data from PDF files so difficult? This has created a massive $30Bn document data capture software industry and a much larger data entry BPO industry, both of which specialize in getting data out of unstructured formats (PDF, paper or images) and to structured formats (JSON/XML/CSV/Excel).
That's why, enterprises, often have to outsource document processing or install automated document data capture software within their premise. Even if it works, the process is not completely foolproof and is prone to all kinds of errors. The approach doesn't work when the pdf comes in form of a scanned document. The only option people and enterprises are left with is manually copying text from pdf files and paste it to MS Word or Excel spreadsheet and take it from there. The problem arises when the receiving business needs to consume these documents digitally. Most of these documents are generated digitally using some software and shared via email as PDF files. Why is it necessary to extract data from PDF files?īusinesses exchange a lot of information with each other via PDF files
And this had massive advantages in the day when the main objective was to be able to send documents digitally where the receiving party would be able to see the exact same document when printed. PDF was designed by Adobe in the 90s with the goal to make any file look exactly the same no matter what screen you see it on.
Portable Document Format, commonly known as PDF files have become ubiquitous since it was introduced in 1993. In this blog, we discuss different methods of extracting text from pdf files and ways to automate the entire workflow. This collected data has to go through different layers of processing and pdf files are converted to different structured formats such as csv, excel files, or json before they could be processed.
Industries such as insurance and lending rely heavily on pdf file format to collect data from their customers. PDF is one of the most preferred file formats to share crucial data amongst businesses.