Changing my work habits

Hello All,

All day long I shuffle through a lot of paper at work. No kidding. I spend more time shuffling through them trying to find the one I need, then I do working. It’s the same with everybody in the company. My buddy owns the logistic company and has been in business for about seven years. Well, he asked if I could come in and help for a bit due to being understaffed, so I said sure.

We deal with final mile delivery. His system is paper-based and has been and he is stubborn to change. But I think I have some ideas of how to eliminate some of the paperwork but need some help in doing so. With my printer (and I am sure others do it) I can scan a piece of paper, and have it go to my computer where it will be an editable pdf. So I want to take a delivery order and scan it in and then copy certain text from the order. That data would go to a spreadsheet, and then aomw info would be added to the original delivery sheet. We have about 10 trucks that run a day, and they make about 15 stops each.

We don’t have a system of tracking all this except for using the paperwork from the middle man. Hopefully, this image shows up, but if not, I want to pull the customers name, address, and phone number. The shipment #, the shipper, and the type of delivery from each delivery that I scan by computer. It would be nice to do it without the printer which would save paper.

might just have to copy and paste line.

Then after that I would like to a couple of checkboxes and maybe a fill in the blank or two. I don’t have the know how to get this going, and I am asking you all to help me learn how to do this. Please if you have any thoughts on how I can do this, please share with me. I just want to help save some trees. Thanks in advance

Jack

Model: Macbook Pro
AppleScript: 2.8
Browser: Safari Version 9.0
Operating System: Mac OS X (10.10)

Basically all I want to do is scrape some info off pdf forms that will automatically put it into a spreadsheet. Can anyone help with that?

Well I am making some progress. I have created a adobe form with some fields in it. Now I need to figure out how to disperse that onto every page I need it on. I also have used readiris ocr to narrow down the text that I need, just have no clue how to automate that process. So, the wheels keep on turning here, if anyone has some suggestions I could sure use them. Thanks.

Hey Jack,

Sorry to not offer much in the way of help. The problem is not having similar hardware and software to test with.

You also need to be more specific about your process and what apps you’re using.

I assume you have Adobe Acrobat, and you say you have ReadIris “ but you don’t say what spreadsheet.


Best Regards,
Chris


MacBookPro6,1 · 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7 · 8GB RAM · OSX 10.11

Got it, I am new here so Im learning. I figure if I keep posting updates and people see me trying to do it myself that someone would eventually say something. Damn thing is I can’t figure out how to put a picture or a file up so that you can see what I have done. I was thinking of just putting it on one of my websites and providing the link that way. That wold be the only way I would know how to get a pic up of what I have done so far.

But to be more specific about what I am using. I am using readiris 14 the OCR software. I have adobe acrobat pro XI, and then I am using excel 11 for mac. Seems like my macbook has a newer version of excel then my iMac. Just a bit ago I figured out how to make my forms expand to multiple pages. So that was really awesome. I haven’t attempted messing with it once I figured that I could expand them to more than one page. Hoping it isn’t if something like if I expand it to all pages, once I enter info into one field, each page’s field will be the same as that entry.

Of course I have automator and apple scripts on the mac, I have no clue how to make them actually work. I have spent many of countless nights trying to make the little robot guy do something for me, but he always win’s. Got text wrangler, and Xcode, but here again have no clue what to do with them.

Doubt this picture will work, but if it does I will go on and put some more up that way, if not, I can if I have to go one of my websites and hide in there and provide that link. [img]file:///Users/jack1/Desktop/Screen%20Shot%202015-10-15%20at%201528.png[img]

Thanks for chiming in, I really appreciate it, Chris

Jack

Hey Jack,

See here for the correct BBCode syntax to post URLs, images, and such:

http://macscripter.net/help.php#bbcode

You’ve provided a local file URL on your system. It’s not a valid Internet URI.

You’ve also missed closing the end tag.

[img]http://members.aceweb.com/randsautos/photogallery/ferrari/enzo/sm_Ferrari-Enzo-028.jpg[/img]

(Remove the two backslashes at the beginning to make the image show up as it does below.)

-Chris

Ok, we will see how this one works. If it works I will post the others that I uploaded. This particular page is just an example of what the first page of each delivery sheet we use. It redacted some info and kept it blurry as to not give out anyone’s personal address or phone number. Hopefully this one works. You’ll have to forgive me I am new to all of this. Thanks.

http://i2.wp.com/inklingdesignteam.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Screen-Shot-2015-10-15-at-1531-11.png

Model: iMac late 2010, MBP late 2013
Browser: Safari 601.1.56
Operating System: Mac OS X (10.10)

Ok, awesome that worked. So the highlighted areas are the areas that I want to export to a Excel Spreadsheet to track a) accounting of deliveries, b) also to be able to create quick maps by having the address in a block that I can just grab and paste it into the mapping software. Here goes with some more links or photos and I will give a brief description with each.

This page shows more of the same of the first post. A little more in depth by providing numbered areas where the info that I want to pull out of the document is.
http://i2.wp.com/inklingdesignteam.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Screen-Shot-2015-10-15-at-15301.png

This is a look at the current spreadsheet we use. It has the baisc fields and I would only be looking to add a few extra fields here. Now of course I am not looking to have this thing done by next week, I have feeling it will go in stages
http://i2.wp.com/inklingdesignteam.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-01.32.34.jpg

The last one here will be the form I have created so far. A replica of the one. This particular one doesn’t have the drop downs menu items for the charges. But I figure 4-5 different charges ought to cover every possible situation. http://i2.wp.com/inklingdesignteam.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Screen-Shot-2015-10-16-at-01.32.34.jpg

Something similar to this last photo is what I think ultimately will be of great use to the business. I could go on and on about the amount of wasted man hours that we have do to fishing for a piece of paper. Ok, that is all for now. Thanks for sticking with me. Have a good one, and I appreciate any advice that can help me figure out how to automate some of this process.