We have a home-built Request for Information SharePoint app that works reasonably well overall, however, it requires someone to manually copy the RFI request from a Word doc into SharePoint. Is there any way we can automatically extract data from Word, a PDF form, an email, or anything else (besides Excel) and have it entered into a SharePoint list?
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You should use API to read those documents. For example PDF can be read using a 3rd party API like iTextSharp or Foxit etc. Similarly email etc.– Amal HashimCommented Jan 23, 2015 at 20:26
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Could you please give me an idea of how that might be done? I checked out iTextSharp and Foxit and don't see how to extract PDF data. I am not a coding expert.– WebaphileCommented Jan 23, 2015 at 22:52
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How are you planning to automate this? From where the code will run? For parsing pdf check this sample– Amal HashimCommented Jan 23, 2015 at 22:54
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Thanks for the link, I will see if there is someone available who could check it out. I don't know yet whether this will need to run locally or on the server farm, and I don't know yet how we'll automate it ... I am trying to figure that out.– WebaphileCommented Jan 23, 2015 at 23:11
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1 Answer
Option1. If you have control over the Word document you can create a word template that includes the metadata as a field inside the Word document. The document author fills out those fields. When uploading the document in SharePoint, the metadata is automatically filled out with the values from the word document. This will only work with MS Office documents.
Samples:
- http://blogs.technet.com/b/brenclarke/archive/2009/04/15/automatically-create-word-documents-which-include-list-fields.aspx
- http://en.share-gate.com/blog/quick-tip-combining-word-and-metadata-through-quick-parts
Option 2. If you have an excel file you can also copy paste multiple lines of metadata by using the datasheet view of your list.
Option 3. If you are processing a lot of (incomming) letters, emails etc... You might want to look into 3rd party solutions that scan documents and extact their metadata. They scan documents, display it a tool, let you point and select the metadata and upload the file (and metadata) to SharePoint.
We use this one: https://www.knowledgelake.com/knowledgelake-capture-document-scanning-sharepoint
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Could you please expand on Option 1? That is exactly what we would like to be able to do. Though we need form content as well as just metadata. Thanks! Commented Jan 27, 2015 at 0:37
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