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Firms are grappling with making the move to a paperless office. Advances in storage, searching, and imaging technology have brought this dream tantalizingly close. To this end, Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI) is a real jewel buried in the sea of Office products. MODI has been around for several versions of Microsoft Office, but in the release of Microsoft Office 2003, it has matured into a low cost yet powerful contender as a document imaging solution. Given its capabilities in scanning and OCR (converting images of words into text), and its integration with Microsoft’s server search technology, MODI could be your firm’s low-cost stealth technology in the push towards a truly “paperless” office.
MODI began as a simple viewer for image files—specifically TIFF image files—a common file format for scanned images. Scanning documents into an electronic format is the first step in going paperless, turning reams of paper into digital images. But this did not solve the problem of easily searching, sorting, and filtering the content of each image. This is where MODI provides tremendous value. Until now, a TIFF file was only a picture of the original document. MODI’s built in OCR capability “recognizes” words on the page and turns them into text that can be searched with keywords. MODI also allows the addition of tags so those same files can be sorted and filtered using pre-defined categories. With MODI, the electronic documents have far greater value and functionality than the original paper.
Once the text has been recognized, now what? Often that recognized text is stored in a file separate from the image file, usually requiring another software product to connect them. MODI stores the text within a hidden region inside the TIFF file itself. The text can be searched, but the original image remains.
Once in electronic form, MODI allows you to add comments, highlight text, or add other annotations to the file. Similar to an ink highlighter on paper, digital highlighters mark words and passages in the electronic document. If these are distracting, MODI stores these mark-ups as a separate layer, hiding them with the click of a button. Furthermore, you can add “meta” data to the file—keywords, categories, or other coding schemes—that are stored with the file but invisible to the reader.
