1) Access Imaging Seminar

Hi Alex

I have not watched that seminar yet. I will do so soon. The bulk of what I am thinking of is how to manipulate the Data in the pdf file from VBA to capture user information to be used to link to a record as well as how to come up with the optimum solution to handle bulk scanning of documents.

A lot of this I also covered in ABCD Core Part 5. In fact, one of the things I had planned to make the ABCD do well with is storing documents related to customers. This is important for any medical office, law firm, etc., where they have to keep lots of documents for their customers. As far as manipulating PDFs directly from VBA, that's kind of tough. Access and VBA by themselves don't really have the tools necessary to manipulate PDF files, but there are third-party utilities you can get and you can control them from VBA. I was playing with some of them the other day; you could do things like split files apart and such. One thing I was thinking of building was the ability to add files en masse to a database by simply copying them to a specific folder, then click a button in the database, and it just pulls all the files in that folder in and then attaches them to whatever record you pick. If someone she could do. And as far as reading in a PDF file, that might be possible by using Word as an intermediate ' open up Word, pull in the PDF file, save it as text, and then pull that into Access. That might make an interesting video as well.

More ABCD next?

It's on the list.

As Richard says, using PDFs as an input source is tough.  Not only would you need good text recognition (OCR, which is often not 100% correct), but you would also need to extract the right text and put it in the right field.  On forms that have complex layouts (which most forms do; see picture below), this would be so difficult (if not impossible) that you might actually save time by typing the data manually into Access.  PDFs are great as output, not input.  You need to work with a data format that is more programmer-friendly.  Ask the people who give you the PDFs if they can give you the data in csv, txt, xlsx, etc., any format but PDF.

The only kind of PDF that is "friendly" for importing is one that is in a table format, or a format that looks like a table.  In that case, Excel can import it with ease (go to Data -> Get Data -> From File -> From PDF) and put all the text in almost exactly the same table format.  See picture below.  A scanned PDF needs to be fully OCR'ed for this to work.

Hi Richard
I am re-watching developer 39. I think this is a nice idea for a tech help series rather than developer lessons. If you do documents index 2.0 incorporating open AI.

I always work with government forms, so PDFs are a fact of life. I am looking at a program called bulkpdf (bulkpdf.de), which claims it can fill PDFs from Access data (and others). If it works, although it is third-party, it may be the answer to an age-old problem. I also vote for more with ABCD and the need for document control.

I believe Richard has already done a video on filling in PDF forms with Access.  The topic of this thread is actually reading info from a PDF and assigning it correctly to Access table fields, which is a much tougher challenge.

Yes Kevin.
As I said PDF is omnipresent in governmental agencies. Having the ability to read something as simple as an ID or a code that can then be used for:
1) naming the file
2) assigning the file to a Record
3) split the pdf to individual documents

Will be a life saver.

I would handle it the same way I'd handle parsing data from a webpage. Open the PDF. Switch to it. Copy the data from it. Paste it into a field in an Access form. Parse away. I do something like this with my Account Balances Template where I read balances off of bank websites.

Oh wait... I haven't published that update yet... but it's coming. :)