Extract Form Data in Workflow Assistant

Omnipage pro Extract Form Data in Workflow Assistant

This topic relates only to OmniPage Professional.

To extract form data

  1. Open the Workflow Assistant to create a workflow.

  2. Enter a name for your workflow in the Create New Workflow panel, then click Next.

  3. In the Load Files panel, specify the file or folder names for the filled forms or ask for prompting. You can also set preprocessing options.

  4. Click Next.

  5. Choose Extract Form Data as second step instead of Recognize Images. To do this, click the strip at the bottom of the Recognize Images workflow step and choose Extract Form Data from the list of the currently available steps.

  6. Choose settings for the Extract Form Data step:

  • Choose your form template file. This must be an active PDF form (either filled or unfilled). It must present a good representation of all forms to be subsequently processed. It must have the same number of pages as the subsequent forms, including the effects of page ranges.  

  • Select a recognition language, and if desired, dictionaries. Do not choose Japanese, Chinese or Korean. The option ‘Verify language choices’ serves only to warn you that Asian language text was detected and that this text will not have been exported correctly.

  • The option ‘Detect single language’ is useful for unattended form processing when the languages used in the forms may vary and cannot be known in advance. The program analyses each form and assigns a single language to each page, choosing from languages using a latin-based alphabet that have dictionary support.

  • You can exclude the filling instruction pages – if any – by specifying a page range.

  1. Click Next.

  2. In the Save panel, select the saving options: Create one file for all pages is the recommended file option, but other options are offered. Define where the comma-separated value text files (.csv) should be saved. You can specify the output file name and location or you can ask to be prompted for file name and location when running the workflow.

  3. Click Finish to save the workflow and close the Workflow Assistant.

  4. Click the Start button with this workflow selected in the Workflow drop-down list to run the workflow. The extracted form data will be saved in a .csv file in the defined folder under the specified file name.

  5. Open it in Microsoft Excel or import it into a database.

 

  • The Form Data Extraction step can be selected as the first workflow step. This is useful if you want to preview the forms. After loading the forms into OmniPage you can reorder them or use SET tools. Then start the workflow and choose Process all pages in the Start Workflow dialog box.

Extract Form Data in Workflow Assistant