Quick Fields Overview

Quick Fields is an automated batch scanning, capture, and processing solution. Running a configured session in Quick Fields will automatically:

  • Identify different types of documents
  • Capture information from batches of scanned or electronic documents
  • Extract data and use it to populate metadata or search for key information
  • Add information such as annotations
  • Store the documents in a Laserfiche repository

Here is an example of how Quick Fields can help your organization save time and money.

Alice is scanning archives of letters sent by her company in order to store the digital images securely in Laserfiche. She wants to take the date from each letter and put it into a Laserfiche field, then sort the documents into Laserfiche folders based on that date. With regular scanning, she would have to look at the date on each letter and type it into the appropriate field. She would also have to organize the documents before or after scanning so they’d be in the correct folders. Since she has file cabinets full of letters to scan, this would be a very time-consuming and tedious process.

With Quick Fields, she can automate these processes. She can configure Quick Fields to extract the date from a certain place on each letter, insert it into the Laserfiche fields, create appropriate folders in Laserfiche, and file the documents accordingly.

What if Alice’s needs are more complicated? What if she encounters scenarios such as the following?

  • She wants to capture more information from the letters than just the date.
  • Some of the letters in the files are photocopies of photocopies, and they are so grayed and speckled that the information can be difficult to read.
  • Letters and invoices are mixed together, but they need to be handled differently.
  • The dates on the letters are in the format "January 20, 1985," but she wants them entered in the fields in the format "01/20/1985"
  • She wants to search the letters for the word "contract," highlight it when it appears, and process those letters differently.
  • She has an outside database containing information that she wants to insert into the fields for each document.

Quick Fields can be configured to handle all of these scenarios and many more. It helps you automate time-consuming data entry and filing processes and work more efficiently.

Types of Documents that Quick Fields Can Process

Quick Fields can process both imaged and electronic documents. Different processes can be used for each; for instance, most of the processes for working with electronic documents involve working with extracted text. Documents that contain both types of pages will be processed according to the properties of each, so configure sessions involving such documents with care to ensure you get the desired results.

Imaged Documents

Imaged documents consist of image pages and sometimes associated text. The image pages are generated by scanning physical documents or using a document conversion program such as Laserfiche Snapshot. Laserfiche uses TIFF (Tagged Image File Format), a non-proprietary file type that can be opened in most image viewing programs. Quick Fields supports TIFF and other image file types.

You can process imaged documents by extracting information from them such as: data from a barcode, whether an option is selected, or whether the document contains specific text. If an imaged document does not already have text associated with it, you can generate text using OmniPage OCR (Optical Character Recognition). With OmniPage Zone OCR (an add-on) you can specify a region or zone from which to generate text. The extracted data can be used to fill out document metadata such as document name, folder path, or fields, or to look up additional information from a database. Quick Fields offers many image enhancement tools to help refine the appearance of your images. These will improve the accuracy of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and other data extraction processes.

You can also add information to imaged documents by using various annotation and stamp process add-ons, including Fixed Annotation, Auto-Annotation, Permanent Stamp, and Bates Numbering.

Electronic Documents

Electronic documents are associated with an electronic file, such as a PDF, Word document, or Excel spreadsheet. PDF documents can be viewed in Quick Fields if you have Adobe Reader installed on the same machine where Quick Fields is installed. Many other types of electronic documents can also be processed in Quick Fields even if they cannot be viewed in the Image pane.

Note: To view PDFs in Quick Fields, Adobe Reader must be configured to open PDFs in the browser. This setting can be changed in Adobe Reader from the Internet option under Preferences.

Most of the Quick Fields processes that apply to electronic documents involve working with extracted text. If your electronic document has associated text, you can use the Text Extraction process to generate text for use in Quick Fields and Laserfiche. With add-ons such as Pattern Matching and other processes that handle text, you can fill out document metadata such as document name, fields, and folder path, or look up additional information from a database.

In addition to electronic files, text, and metadata, electronic documents can also have associated image pages. When working with documents that contain both image and electronic files, First Page Identification and other processes can work differently on each. Configure your session with care to avoid configuring processes that will handle image and electronic files very differently and cause unexpected results.

Note: Processes that work with electronic documents can only be applied in the Pre-Classification Processing stage.