I need to make an alphabetical list (right now it's on hundreds of pages with pencil).
Only info for each data point is name, address, phone number

John Doe
101 Circle Drive
512-212-5566

What's the easiest way to do this? Thanks

Some not really and up to 30 years old.

Is there a program or something?

Is the information in the list confidential or could you scan a page and send it to me and I can see if it can be converted?

Confidential client list

See if you can follow this guide to get the list digitized then move it over the Excel for sorting.

https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/hub/use-ocr-to-turn-handwritten-text-into-pdf-files.html

Where's AI when you need it?

How would I use it?

No idea on the OP, but we have a license with Copilot and I use it everyday with confidential information.

In our license, it's outlined that the data we input remains confidential and can't be used by them. We've even input a lot of internal documents so I can just use Copilot to tell me whatever policy, etc. I need vs. searching for it.

Copilot does seem secure in general but everyone still should be careful.

I have not used Copilot so my experience is just based on a little bit of digging around and I have some concerns. For example, they can use your data to train their model if you give them permission to. In some cases it can be easy to consent to something like that if you are not reading all of the terms.

Also, the only version of Copilot that is HIPAA compliant is Security Copilot. If everything was secure across all of Copilot, I do not see why there is a need to have a separate product specifically focused on secure data.

Not sure...but if my IT, contract, legal, compliance, etc. teams all said I'm good to plug in whatever I want, I'm going to plug in detailed info to get more relevant returns.

But that's all above my pay grade.

If I didn't scan in the pages but entered the info new....

What is the best way to do this?

So there's no way for it to be in the format I have in the original post. That's how it is on the papers and this will be printed, not used on the computer.

You could type everything for one entry into one cell in Excel but assuming that you want to sort them by last name, I would enter Doe, John instead of John Doe. You could still use the column sort in that case and then print from Excel. You can do it in Word too but you would need to set up some fields for the type of data and I don't think you would be gaining anything going that route.

MaroonSpirit said:

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So there's no way for it to be in the format I have in the original post. That's how it is on the papers and this will be printed, not used on the computer.

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If they're all in rows then you can just do formulas based on the desired output. Like sheet 1 is your output and sheet 2 is your raw data, then you can just do formulas in sheet 1 to pull what you want. Sort sheet 2 by alpha on firstname or lastname.

Basic idea is to do ='Sheet 2'!A1 & " " & 'Sheet 2"!B1 etc... and then when you copy paste the formula down the column you pull in 100's of entries

MaroonSpirit said:

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So there's no way for it to be in the format I have in the original post. That's how it is on the papers and this will be printed, not used on the computer.

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When I was doing this type of thing, I used excel. The colums were FIRST NAME, LAST NAME, STREET, CITY, STATE, ZIP, and PHONE. I could sort by any column, or multiple columns. Especially LAST NAME, FIRST NAME, and ZIP. I also used word to merge the data into letters or reports, to get the printed format I needed.

If you can scan your existing documents using. OCR, you might be able to import the resulting file into excel.

Do you have anyone who can code? AWS Transcribe is a service for this exact use case.

MaroonSpirit said:

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I need to make an alphabetical list (right now it's on hundreds of pages with pencil).
Only info for each data point is name, address, phone number

John Doe
101 Circle Drive
512-212-5566

What's the easiest way to do this? Thanks

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As others have suggested, the easiest is to enter the data into a spreadsheet. This will automatically adjust the column sizes as needed when (if) you print it out.

techno-ag said:

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Your best bet might be to contract with someone to enter the data into a spreadsheet by hand.

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We have an office in India for these type of tasks, likely the easiest option for OP.