Watch our video to see how to capture and setup a table element on fixed forms within ABBYY FlexiCapture.
Hello. Today I’m going to show you how to create a table within the document definition editor within ABBYY FlexiCapture. The purpose of the table is, of course, to extract table-like details, columns and rows and different ways that we can separate those.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to select our table element first, and you can see, of course, we have other types of elements, but in this case, we want to capture just a table. I’m going to tell the software where this table exists.
Now, what I want to do when I capture a table is I want to make sure I ignore the header row, because typically, the header row contains text. Obviously, if it does contain a value, make sure you capture it, but in this case, it just contains the text of the column names, and I want to ignore that. So, in this case, I’m just going to really drag and drop where this table element’s width and height should contain itself. That’s exactly what the software will do. It’ll look for a table in this position every time on a fixed form.
Next, what I’m going to do is I’m going to have the software auto detect vertical separators, and then also auto detect horizontal separators. This can be tricky to see on the video, but what it did is it actually did create its own columns here, so you can kind of see it did separate each column, and it actually did add an extra one. What we’re going to do for that extra one is we’re going to delete it, and what we do is we need to select our delete separator option, and delete any additional ones that we have there as well.
Now, I do not believe the software auto detected the difference in the job code … or actually, it actually did. I’m sorry. It did detect it. What we’re going to do is we’re going to tell the software now to delete it, and I’m going to show you how to add one manually.
Now that we’ve deleted it, I want you to go select the table element again, and we have the ability to add manual separators. The way we do that is if we want to add a manual vertical separator, what we need to do is we need to hold the Shift key, make sure we have the table element selected, and then hold the Shift key, and then once we do that, we can place it. You can see there’s a dotted field separator that’s ready for me to stop moving at any time, and really, we just place that where we want it to go.
Now if we wanted to place a manual horizontal separator, what we need to do is press the Alt button, and using the Alt button will then allow us to do a manual horizontal separator, so for like a row separator, that will allow us to place it, which we don’t need to in this case. That’s really how you create a field, or you create a table, and tell it the boundaries of the table.
The next thing we need to do is we need to tell the software what the columns are. So, having the table element selected, all I’m going to do is left click within each column, and you can see the software’s going to ask me what kind of column it is. Is it a text column? Is it a check mark column? In this case, we’re going to tell it that it’s a text column. That’s really all we need to do for each one of these. These are all going to be text.
Then, of course, we have the ability to name them, so we can go into each column and have, just like any other field, have control over the properties, the name of the field, what it’s exported as, whether we’re recognizing handwritten text or printed text, and we can get into every field’s specific option we have here, just to make things as customizable for us as we extract this table.
So, that’s an example of how we create a table. It’s very, very easy once you understand, and if you do lose track of how to add those separators manually, definitely reference the help file. The help file describes it in very nice detail how to manage the table element as well.
I hope you enjoy this video, but if you do get stuck, please reach out to us. We would love to help you. Thank you so much.