0

I am using Scantron Cognition Enterprise at work to capture data from scanned forms. Building these forms is tedious at best, especially when it would be nice to have a library of pre-built objects to use. Unfortunately, documentation and on-line resources are scarce.

Does anyone have any pointers to find some resources for this tool?

Moose
  • 5,354
  • 3
  • 33
  • 46
  • This is bringing back memories of high school and #2 pencils. It's been 20 years - Scantron is still the standard for this sort of thing? – Jason Jul 31 '10 at 17:44
  • Tags are intended to categorise a question, and you've picked no existing ones, and created 2 new ones. That's a good way for a question to be ignored. – skaffman Jul 31 '10 at 17:58
  • @skaffman: Do you have some suggestions for tags then? I couldn't come up with any existing tags that fit. – Moose Jul 31 '10 at 18:24
  • @Jason: We actually use the original Scantron forms as well. Luckily I don't have to mess with those. – Moose Jul 31 '10 at 18:25
  • There are nearly 30,000 existing tags, surely one must fit. I'm not really sure what your question is talking about, so I can't suggest any either. – skaffman Jul 31 '10 at 18:26
  • It's about a specific existing product designed to read hand-printed forms and stick that information into a database. it won't be useful to tag it with OCR, or database, because that's not what the question is about. I am sure it will get ignored, but I don't really have any good ideas what to tag it with. If the google searches I've done are any indication, I'm the only one using this product. Sorry I don't fit your idea of the proper question-asker. I appreciate your honesty about not knowing what I'm talking about. – Moose Jul 31 '10 at 18:47

1 Answers1

1

Hey Jason, believe it or not, Scantron is STILL the standard, but this is not the Scantron you probably remember. Although OMR (bubble) forms are still used extensively in education, there are a lot more advanced technologies available to be added to them today.

Concerning Cognition, I looked through the available tags and these would fit: "document-imaging" - Cognition is a document imaging product and can feed images and index values into most commercially available document storage applications "OCR" - Optical Character Recognition, or reading machine print. "ICR" - Intelligent Character Recognition - reading hand writing, usually in a constrained print format (one letter per box like a credt card application. "datacollection" - the key purpose of Cognition is data collection. However, there is not a tag for "OMR" - Optical Mark Recognition, or reading bubble choices, similar to the basic Scantron forms of the past. Also, I could not find one for "Key From Image", another purpose that Cognition is used for.

I am a Cognition user as well as someone who markets it and I know that there are a large number of users in North America. Many corporations that use Cognition use it for sensitive HR functions and so might not have their usage of it posted in a searchable format. Many other organizations use it for safety inspections, insurance data entry, and also for testing and surveys - basically anywhere you have a large number of paper forms and need all of the data quickly entered into a database. Many users are using Cognition for sensitive applications are so are not likely to share, but I can share a few I have, you could also contact your Scantron rep and they might have something they could share as well. I have some decent ICR fields built for name, e-mail, address, etc. The ICR fields are best when you build in your own dictionary or database look-ups. The OMR fields are the hard ones to build, but I have a few of these as well. The easiest way to share these is to send you the form that already has the field built into it. You can build your own lookups from txt, xls or db files.

Glenn
  • 1
  • 1
  • Thanks Glenn, that is a big help. One of the things I have run into is that I have a number of forms that are the same-but-not. I see no way of building one, and then copying it to another form. I'm really not looking for ICR fields, just handy tips on how to manage a huge number of forms that have a lot of the same items. It'd be nice to be able to save off the definition of a field so I don't have to recreate it 30 times. My real issue is that I came from Cognition Pro, and we recently moved to Enterprise. I knew some tricks in Pro that I could duplicate a form, but not so in Enterprise. – Moose Aug 01 '10 at 16:21