The tables as a symbol of order, being widely used in the industries like Finance, Education, Manufacturers, etc. It usefully makes data organized, but with the database widely, papers may not be a good carrier to save and share tables.
That leads to a question: how can we extract tables from papers automatically? You may not seriously want to type the data on excel one by one, right? Here comes table recognition.
Who Will Find Table Extraction Useful
Finance
Invoices are something that the financial departments are very familiar with. There are paper invoices and electronic invoices, but all are generated in a table format. When making tax reports, these cumbersome materials may cause high labor costs for the company. To overcome these obstacles, we can extract table data from the document, and then get the desired data from the database to make reports, thereby upgrading them to an updated version. Why collect the data manually when it can be done automatically?
Manufacturers
People often use online forms to gather the information that businesses need and at the same time connect it to other software or platforms in their workflow. So reducing manual data entry (using automated data entry) increases productivity. Form extraction can also reduce the cost of printing, mailing, storing, organizing, and destroying traditional paper forms.
Education
Teachers often use forms to record students' information, whether it is final grades or daily sign-in. If you take a photo, you can identify and extract the forms in the file, which will greatly reduce the workload of teachers. With this, we don’t need to search for images or copy the table content to any new files, instead, we can directly use the imported tables and start working on the extracted information.
How to Combine Table Extraction into Your Project
The application scenarios of table extraction are introduced above, so how to realize this convenient function with ComPDFKit?
OCR
Table recognition is usually combined with OCR, which is its basic function. The first step of OCR is to recognize the tables, contents, lines, etc. Furthermore, OCR is the basis of Document AI. Document AI is an intelligent document processing solution including OCR, table recognition, and precise data extraction. AI-based technologies deliver fast and highly accurate results of data extraction.
SDK
The table recognition function will be used in the process of converting PDF to Excel, Image to PDF. This is a very natural conversion sequence: analyze the document, identify the corresponding table and text content, and then perform format conversion.
ComPDFKit provides high-fidelity PDF conversion SDK to MS Office, HTML, Text, CSV, RTF, Images, etc. Whether you need to combine ComPDFKit conversion SDK into your APP, system, or website, it can always meet your needs.
CMD
Command-line tools (CMD) are the text-based interface that interacts with a specific program. With CMD, you can extract all text or images at once, just typing the command and waiting for it. This happens when you just need this certain feature, and no need to have an APP or system, just type the command and you’ll get what you want.
API
Another convenient method is to call the API. You don't need to bear the cost of the server, ComPDFKit will handle it all for you. This method is suitable for a project that can connect to the Internet at any time as it’s a condition to call the API.
Final Words
We have introduced who will find table recognition useful, and we also know that ComPDFKit can implement this function in different ways to meet the needs of different companies. If you want to know more about table recognition, please don’t hesitate to contact us!