Suggestions? Excel Data type; searchable price lookup from OCR'd PDF
reddit / selfhosted

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Fimeg · 2023-10-04 23:50

I have a friend who recently tasked me with a small goal of replacing
his paper field manual (car parts, service repair costs) with a
digital version. I'm curious what solutions the selfhosted community
can help me come up with.


I OCR'd his 44 pages of data that includes 5 fields, Item #,
Description, cost price, etc and what I'm envisioning is a solution
where he can type what he knows will be on those sheets into a simple
field and have the results populate - this would be the most basic
functionality I could provide.


It would be nice to add features like him selecting the parts or
services and it combining them but that is not a requirement at this
time.


I'm quite experienced as a selfhoster so feel free to toss ideas that
are niche! I'll be on awesome/Selfhosted looking but please do suggest
away!


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selfh-sted · 2023-10-05 12:36

[Paperless-ngx](https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx) sounds
like it would fit the bill. It has OCR capabilities that would allow
your friend to search within documents, but you could also tag them
(one tag for each relevant part, service, etc.) for easy browsing as
well.

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Fimeg · 2023-10-05 12:39

I have it running, and it was what I used to perform the OCR, however
it’s just one pdf and so searching only opens that one off in full.

Unless paperless has more features I know not of, it seems just using
the OCR’d pdf on a sub.domain and letting them use the browsers ctrl+f
might be the best solution.

Still open for more solutions! I have 44 pages on one pdf.

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selfh-sted · 2023-10-05 12:49

Got it - sorry for misunderstanding. It almost seems like you may want
to OCR it and try to get it into Excel to build tables, dropdowns,
etc.

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Fimeg · 2023-10-05 12:50

Which I could do! I just don’t know what id do following up that…
should I create assets or an inventory sheet idk.

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selfh-sted · 2023-10-05 13:11

I'd be willing to talk through it if you can provide more details.

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Fimeg · 2023-10-05 13:36

Absolutely! Pm? I can send you a link to my instance and file.

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selfh-sted · 2023-10-05 13:43

Sure - whichever you prefer!