Outlook is a great software application that allows you to manage your email, your calendar and your contacts. The Outlook contact manager is a very powerful tool yet one feature is missing: scanning business cards into Outlook in a fast an easy way. Of course you could manually transcribe the business cards but this takes a lot of time and your time is most probably better spent on other things.
The solution to scan business cards into Outlook is the web-based software called CogniCard. With CogniCard you can scan business cards and all the information is retrieved from the business card. All you need is an account at www.cognicard.com and then take a picture of a business card and upload it to the secure CogniCard service. CogniCard will then process all the text on the business card and will send you an email with the contact information from that business card. This email will be sent to your Outlook email address and when you open the attachment, the contact information will be automatically stored in your Outlook address book.
You have several options how you can upload business cards to Cognicard. We will explain them briefly:
Send cards with your smartphone
You can use any smartphone you have to take a picture of a business card and send it to your personal CogniCard MailIn eMail address that you receive when you sign up for CogniCard.
Upload cards with your webcam
With CogniCard and a browser-based application you can take pictures with your webcam and upload cards directly in your browser. Just hold the business card in front of the webcam and the data will be uploaded to the CogniCard servers where it is processed and then returned to you so that you can import it again.
Upload individual pictures
If you have a digital camera you can simply take pictures of your business cards and then upload them through our website as well. If you don’t have a webcam or smartphone this is a very convenient way as well. You can also send multiple pictures via eMail, they will all be processed as well.
The most powerful: Scanning business cards with your flatbed scanner
The most time-efficient way to scan your business cards is by using your flatbed scanner and uploading multiple card in one run. You can just put multiple cards on your flatbed scanner and then scan them and create a JPEG. This JPEG is then sent to your personal CogniCard eMail address and will then be processed and the individual cards will be returned to you.
In which format is the data returned?
All business cards are scanned and processed and the data is returned to you as a VCF file in an eMail. This VCF can be opened in your Email Program such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird. You can then open this attachment and import it to your address books. VCF is a global standard and every program that works with contact information can read it. You can also export all your contacts as a CSV (Comma Separated Value) file which can be opened in Microsoft Excel or imported into other applications.
This is a fast and efficient process that delivers high quality results. It works like magic and will help you save a lot of time to digitize your business cards while at the same time integrating with your existing tools.
You can sign up for CogniCard and then find out for yourself how easy it is to scan your business cards into Outlook with this service.