Data Mining Software - Discover Software Modernization

Data mining software is usually an application that one uses and covers mostly with one's knowledge in the discovery of software modernization. Mining data software involves the understanding of the software artifacts that exist and the mining data tools. This process has very close relations with reverse engineering. The knowledge that one gains from studying data software that exists is usually presented in forms of models and by doing these queries one can be in a position to make his personal data mining software. With the knowledge that someone gains it must be applicable and one must also know the mining data tools that are suppose to be used apart from the soft wares. One can be able to know very widely about the mining data tools that are there in mining data software by doing computer science as a course. Computer science covers widely on what are the procedures, steps of mining data software and how can use the mining data tools.

This software is mostly used in making of databases schemes. Making of databases is not as easy as many would think it requires one to have some knowledge about computer engineering and the basic concepts of computers.;This software is mostly used in data crawling because it can be in a position to store data and one can be able to retrieve the data when needed.

The softwares are not that cheap they come in different varieties and it will depend on which information or the database on which one is coming up with.

Data mining software are usually in different levels there is the data level, design level, application level, architectural level, call graph level and program level it will depend on which level one is covering and this come together with mining data tools.

Data software's have increased rapidly through the introduction of computers and ERP definition. Computers hackers have been able to get the softwares at a very low price and this has made data mining to become very easy and quick to use in the shops and supermarkets and also government institutions. One cannot do data crawling without having the basic knowledge about data mining soft wares because soft wares are the programmes that are usually installed into the computer and without the programmes then no data can be processed.

There are a lot of challenges that come with the use of the mining soft ware. One can easily crush the software he is using or the softwares can easily break they are normally sold on CDS one can easily break it or loose it.

High chances of losing the data that someone is coming up with is very high because computers easily crash due to some difficulties that they experience or a virus can easily crush the computer.

Mining software take a very large space and in most of the computers. The reason behind this is because, data crawling use graphics. Graphics usually occupy a lot of space in terms of the size of the local disk. One is suppose to look for a computer that has very good memory. Data crawling is something that needs to be updated each and every time something appears along the way.


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Data Mining's Importance in Today's Corporate Industry

A large amount of information is collected normally in business, government departments and research & development organizations. They are typically stored in large information warehouses or bases. For data mining tasks suitable data has to be extracted, linked, cleaned and integrated with external sources. In other words, it is the retrieval of useful information from large masses of information, which is also presented in an analyzed form for specific decision-making.

Data mining is the automated analysis of large information sets to find patterns and trends that might otherwise go undiscovered. It is largely used in several applications such as understanding consumer research marketing, product analysis, demand and supply analysis, telecommunications and so on. Data Mining is based on mathematical algorithm and analytical skills to drive the desired results from the huge database collection.

It can be technically defined as the automated mining of hidden information from large databases for predictive analysis. Web mining requires the use of mathematical algorithms and statistical techniques integrated with software tools.

Data mining includes a number of different technical approaches, such as:

    Clustering
    Data Summarization
    Learning Classification Rules
    Finding Dependency Networks
    Analyzing Changes
    Detecting Anomalies

The software enables users to analyze large databases to provide solutions to business decision problems. Data mining is a technology and not a business solution like statistics. Thus the data mining software provides an idea about the customers that would be intrigued by the new product.

It is available in various forms like text, web, audio & video data mining, pictorial data mining, relational databases, and social networks. Data mining is thus also known as Knowledge Discovery in Databases since it involves searching for implicit information in large databases. The main kinds of data mining software are: clustering and segmentation software, statistical analysis software, text analysis, mining and information retrieval software and visualization software.

Data Mining therefore has arrived on the scene at the very appropriate time, helping these enterprises to achieve a number of complex tasks that would have taken up ages but for the advent of this marvelous new technology.



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Data Extraction - A Guideline to Use Scrapping Tools Effectively

So many people around the world do not have much knowledge about these scrapping tools. In their views, mining means extracting resources from the earth. In these internet technology days, the new mined resource is data. There are so many data mining software tools are available in the internet to extract specific data from the web. Every company in the world has been dealing with tons of data, managing and converting this data into a useful form is a real hectic work for them. If this right information is not available at the right time a company will lose valuable time to making strategic decisions on this accurate information.

This type of situation will break opportunities in the present competitive market. However, in these situations, the data extraction and data mining tools will help you to take the strategic decisions in right time to reach your goals in this competitive business. There are so many advantages with these tools that you can store customer information in a sequential manner, you can know the operations of your competitors, and also you can figure out your company performance. And it is a critical job to every company to have this information at fingertips when they need this information.

To survive in this competitive business world, this data extraction and data mining are critical in operations of the company. There is a powerful tool called Website scraper used in online digital mining. With this toll, you can filter the data in internet and retrieves the information for specific needs. This scrapping tool is used in various fields and types are numerous. Research, surveillance, and the harvesting of direct marketing leads is just a few ways the website scraper assists professionals in the workplace.

Screen scrapping tool is another tool which useful to extract the data from the web. This is much helpful when you work on the internet to mine data to your local hard disks. It provides a graphical interface allowing you to designate Universal Resource Locator, data elements to be extracted, and scripting logic to traverse pages and work with mined data. You can use this tool as periodical intervals. By using this tool, you can download the database in internet to you spread sheets. The important one in scrapping tools is Data mining software, it will extract the large amount of information from the web, and it will compare that date into a useful format. This tool is used in various sectors of business, especially, for those who are creating leads, budget establishing seeing the competitors charges and analysis the trends in online. With this tool, the information is gathered and immediately uses for your business needs.

Another best scrapping tool is e mailing scrapping tool, this tool crawls the public email addresses from various web sites. You can easily from a large mailing list with this tool. You can use these mailing lists to promote your product through online and proposals sending an offer for related business and many more to do. With this toll, you can find the targeted customers towards your product or potential business parents. This will allows you to expand your business in the online market.

There are so many well established and esteemed organizations are providing these features free of cost as the trial offer to customers. If you want permanent services, you need to pay nominal fees. You can download these services from their valuable web sites also.


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Web Data Extraction Services and Data Collection Form Website Pages

For any business market research and surveys plays crucial role in strategic decision making. Web scrapping and data extraction techniques help you find relevant information and data for your business or personal use. Most of the time professionals manually copy-paste data from web pages or download a whole website resulting in waste of time and efforts.

Instead, consider using web scraping techniques that crawls through thousands of website pages to extract specific information and simultaneously save this information into a database, CSV file, XML file or any other custom format for future reference.

Examples of web data extraction process include:
• Spider a government portal, extracting names of citizens for a survey
• Crawl competitor websites for product pricing and feature data
• Use web scraping to download images from a stock photography site for website design

Automated Data Collection
Web scraping also allows you to monitor website data changes over stipulated period and collect these data on a scheduled basis automatically. Automated data collection helps you discover market trends, determine user behavior and predict how data will change in near future.

Examples of automated data collection include:
• Monitor price information for select stocks on hourly basis
• Collect mortgage rates from various financial firms on daily basis
• Check whether reports on constant basis as and when required

Using web data extraction services you can mine any data related to your business objective, download them into a spreadsheet so that they can be analyzed and compared with ease.

In this way you get accurate and quicker results saving hundreds of man-hours and money!

With web data extraction services you can easily fetch product pricing information, sales leads, mailing database, competitors data, profile data and many more on a consistent basis.



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Understanding Data Mining

Well begun is half done. We can say that the invention of Internet is the greatest invention of the century which allows for quick information retrieval. It also has negative aspects, as it is an open forum therefore differentiating facts from fiction seems tough. It is the objective of every researcher to know how to perform mining of data on the Internet for accuracy of data. There are a number of search engines that provide powerful search results.

Knowing File Extensions in Data Mining

For mining data the first thing is important to know file extensions. Sites ending with dot-com are either commercial or sales sites. Since sales is involved there is a possibility that the collected information is inaccurate. Sites ending with dot-gov are of government departments, and these sites are reviewed by professionals. Sites ending with dot-org are generally for non-profit organizations. There is a possibility that the information is not accurate. Sites ending with dot-edu are of educational institutions, where the information is sourced by professionals. If you do not have an understanding you may take help of professional data mining services.

Knowing Search Engine Limitations for Data Mining

Second step is to understand when performing data mining is that majority search engines have filtering, file extension, or parameter. These are restrictions to be typed after your search term, for example: if you key in "marketing" and click "search," every site will be listed from dot-com sites having the term "marketing" on its website. If you key in "marketing site.gov," (without the quotation marks) only government department sites will be listed. If you key in "marketing site:.org" only non-profit organizations in marketing will be listed. However, if you key in "marketing site:.edu" only educational sites in marketing will be displayed. Depending on the kind of data that you want to mine after your search term you will have to enter "site.xxx", where xxx will being replaced by.com,.gov,.org or.edu.

Advanced Parameters in Data Mining

When performing data mining it is crucial to understand far beyond file extension that it is even possible to search particular terms, for example: if you are data mining for structural engineer's association of California and you key in "association of California" without quotation marks the search engine will display hundreds of sites having "association" and "California" in their search keywords. If you key in "association of California" with quotation marks, the search engine will display only sites having exactly the phrase "association of California" within the text. If you type in "association of California" site:.com, the search engine will display only sites having "association of California" in the text, from only business organizations.

If you find it difficult it is better to outsource data mining to companies like Online Web Research Services


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Data Entry - 5 Concerns While Outsourcing Data Entry

The world becomes open market for your business because of globalization. Business must set high efficiency level to encourage the output. Apart from core business, one has to perform non-core activities to smoothen the business performance. Managing information is one of the monotonous activities. You can go for data entry but it is, once again, mind-numbing and time-consuming task.

Companies can pick data entry firm in order to have accurate and reliable information handling. There are various data typing services available for different types of businesses for reasonable cost. However, there are continues growth of data typing firms; one must find the best practice and reputed firm to outsource.

Here are 5 concerns while outsourcing data entry:

Affordable Cost: it is the most concern issue of almost any firm that wants to outsource. It is very true that one can save up to 60% of their data typing cost if they outsource such task to country like India.

High Accuracy: The accurate output is also important factor that matters a lot while outsourcing. Without accurate information, companies can not take proper decision and make loss. A good data typing firm is offering 99.98% accuracy. So, there is no need to worry about such.

Time Frame: Companies require the information quickly. If you have huge information and want typing, choose the firm having numbers of professionals and using special techniques to quicken the task.

Data Confidentiality: After listening much about fraud and scam of data typing firm, companies are most concern about the security of data. If you will outsource the requirement to genuine and promising company, your issue of data security will get resolved.

Genuine: Is the firm genuine? Answer is simple. Get the track record of that firm as well as get input from the clients of that firm which you want to outsource.

Although there are such benefits of outsourcing data entry, organizations are staying away from outsourcing because of fraud. To avoid scam, always, ask for the trial or pilot project. So, you will get better idea about their promises and can choose better source for outsourcing data typing.



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Tool For Making Tasks of Amazon Product Extraction

It's really a crowd of people around the world to an effective medium for reaching. To create a ubiquitous presence on the Internet, a better free hosting, graphic design templates for purpose and last but not least, free plug - ins are available for different software can use. To a high ranking in major search engines, Word Press blogs is very effective when it's convenient for the purpose of the promotion and realization.

With the help of an Amazon plug in can be used to automate many tasks. The posting articles, has links to affiliate programs, and powered by Google Programmer. During this time, there are some plains that are very basic in nature and easy to install. Within minutes, they can be easily installed.


As a matter of fact, Amazon's little script plug-ins, which are important for various processes involving an Internet marketer automatically feed the material offers a host of other features, and site map, which is considered the most SEO friendly way be addressed by creating space. Once a person can see the admin panel, various menus used to. Plains in the menu, there would be an option to add a new plug in.

After reaching a once here, there are a number of plains available from one tailored to your specific needs and requirements. EBay is Google or Amazon is an affiliate marketer.Accordingly, your unique affiliate ID with plains that exists for an automated way to provide content and links.

For Amazon, the Amazon of plains that are free and easy to use. Because both the free version and premium versions Car Posters. Plains using for the purpose of SEO on Face book or Twitter to place a sitemap and many other features available. Beautiful open source using a technology that can use many Wardress plains. If you are an affiliate marketer for Amazon only in the Amazon in search settle for four rating.

Such a scenario is unlikely in the case of an Amazon plug in. Amazon plug-in you within a few minutes to review on Amazon products to help. Amazon Wardress Plug-in short period within the relevant Amazon products in bulk and have the ability to add their reviews. Flexible HTML templates to the data based on geographic location and demographic setup according to the segment of users are accustomed to change.

For a long time the benefits of Amazon Berry Extract is kept a secret. Some advantage is that it can offer, but that is all changing now. berry from the Amazon rainforest, and grows on palm trees in Brazil and the locals harvest. After harvesting the berries quickly as long as possible the nutritional content and value are frozen.

Like red wine, berries are known as are a rich source of chemicals. Berry is also a large amount of fiber and protein, fatty acids, omega 6 and omega-9 with the added advantage of containing packaged. Therefore it is quite easy to see why berry extract in po[censored] rity recently and gathering momentum in the health food industry.


Source: http://www.goodinfohome.com/Art/775162/274/Tool-For-Making-Tasks-of-Amazon-Product-Extraction.html

Why Web Scraping Software Won't Help

How to get continuous stream of data from these websites without getting stopped? Scraping logic depends upon the HTML sent out by the web server on page requests, if anything changes in the output, its most likely going to break your scraper setup.

If you are running a website which depends upon getting continuous updated data from some websites, it can be dangerous to reply on just a software.

Some of the challenges you should think:

1. Web masters keep changing their websites to be more user friendly and look better, in turn it breaks the delicate scraper data extraction logic.

2. IP address block: If you continuously keep scraping from a website from your office, your IP is going to get blocked by the "security guards" one day.

3. Websites are increasingly using better ways to send data, Ajax, client side web service calls etc. Making it increasingly harder to scrap data off from these websites. Unless you are an expert in programing, you will not be able to get the data out.

4. Think of a situation, where your newly setup website has started flourishing and suddenly the dream data feed that you used to get stops. In today's society of abundant resources, your users will switch to a service which is still serving them fresh data.

Getting over these challenges

Let experts help you, people who have been in this business for a long time and have been serving clients day in and out. They run their own servers which are there just to do one job, extract data. IP blocking is no issue for them as they can switch servers in minutes and get the scraping exercise back on track. Try this service and you will see what I mean here.



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Amazon Product Extraction They Are One Hundred Percent Reliable

There is no question in the bookstores and our website is the leader in online sales of books. If your book is just on the site, will generate the purchase. But with a modest amount of effort, you will find that building really sells. Each new dream author, his / her book listed on Amazon.

Promo Program offers the authors make use of Amazon; you can significantly increase their number. Provide a clear picture of your book cover to start the process. Amazon’s on your listing page, the page that each visitor first sees. Immediate sale of a cover image page without losing momentum.

Book that will excite prospective buyers and a description of the type presented in your book cover. It this is a book you wrote about you in what you want to have a chance. Amazon’s It has proven to be a very effective sales tool and books more than of the Amazon is now offering lists.

Too often a book review publications and will take time and try to place it. Smart authors review the various sentences and kept them on the site as an endorsement by the Editorial Reviews In addition to publishing excerpts from reviews, to reach out to you as many ads as possible book. It is less known that the Blurbs written by people who praise the book. He was also the page of your listing.

Commentators, including review by a good cross section of the power to your listing. 1,000 members of the Amazon top reviewers, experts in the subject of your book and writing / publishing industry, including well-known people.

A list of top Amazon reviewer’s customer-reviews op reviewers. Can be found. Make sure your friends and acquaintances as for review. More the better. One to five gold stars, you are probably familiar with Amazon rating system. Book reviewer believes is better than the star.

The site is only permitted to post this to the person writing the review, and that person must be a customer of Amazon. If you Biological, commercial aspect of your lives, your achievements, you have written and published books, awards you’ve received, etc. should be done to reduce stress. This is not a personal biography; this book is to help sales.

Amazon also depends on you to provide a bibliography, if you have more than one book. It is also the author through the and more exciting additions to a page section called “latest post.” Amazon on the page to a feed to your allows. If you do not have a , you can easily and can post directly to the page.

You enjoy writing short stories and essays for them, Amazon is an “Amazon Shorts” selected pieces in E appear in book form and sell at 49cents. You receive a percentage of sales. Another program available for you to make money and be. Are you a book or your own website to advertise other products on the Amazon. A link to Amazon is to determine the actual sale is consummated.


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Amazon Product Extraction to Banner Advertising System

Each new dream author, his / her book listed on Amazon. There is no question in the bookstores and our website is the leader in online sales of books. If your book is just on the site, will generate the purchase. But with a modest amount of effort, you will find that building really sells.

Promo Program offers the authors make use of Amazon; you can significantly increase their number. Provide a clear picture of your book cover to start the process. Amazon's on your listing page, the page that each visitor first sees. Immediate sale of a cover image page without losing momentum.

Book that will excite prospective buyers and a description of the type presented in your book cover. It "will appear under the product." This is a book you wrote about you in what you want to have a chance. Amazon’s "Author Central" site and click on the required process to add a simple search "search within.

Too often a book review publications and will take time and try to place it. It is less known that the Blurbs written by people who praise the book. He was also the page of your listing "Editorial Review" section is held Commentators, including review by a good cross section of the power to your listing.

A list of top Amazon reviewers Customer Reviews can be found in the reviewers. Make sure your friends and acquaintances as for review. More the better. One to five gold stars, you are probably familiar with Amazon rating system. Book reviewer believes is better than the star. The site is only permitted to post this to the person writing the review, and that person must be a customer of Amazon.

Amazon also depends on you to provide a bibliography, if you have more than one book. It is also the author through the Union. New and more exciting additions to a page section called "latest blogs post." Amazon on the page to an RSS feed to your blogs allows. If you do not have a blogs, you can easily and can post directly to the page.

You enjoy writing short stories and essays for them, Amazon is an "Amazon Shorts" selected pieces in E - appear in book form and sell at 49cents. You receive a percentage of sales. Are you a book or your own website to advertise other products on the Amazon list?

A link to Amazon is to determine the actual sale is consummated. 15% percent of the value of the sold items you receive. Amazon to banner advertising system will accommodate your site. Once a person can see the admin panel, various menus used to. Plains in the menu, there would be an option to add a new plug in.

Band to the master retailer can check whether you're on your own. You can find many of them in the excellent book "Sell Your Book on Amazon." But at least follow through on the suggestions in this article and see your book sales boom. The site is only permitted to post this to the person writing the review, and that person must be a customer of Amazon.


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Data Mining and Financial Data Analysis

Introduction:

Most marketers understand the value of collecting financial data, but also realize the challenges of leveraging this knowledge to create intelligent, proactive pathways back to the customer. Data mining - technologies and techniques for recognizing and tracking patterns within data - helps businesses sift through layers of seemingly unrelated data for meaningful relationships, where they can anticipate, rather than simply react to, customer needs as well as financial need. In this accessible introduction, we provides a business and technological overview of data mining and outlines how, along with sound business processes and complementary technologies, data mining can reinforce and redefine for financial analysis.

Objective:

1. The main objective of mining techniques is to discuss how customized data mining tools should be developed for financial data analysis.

2. Usage pattern, in terms of the purpose can be categories as per the need for financial analysis.

3. Develop a tool for financial analysis through data mining techniques.

Data mining:

Data mining is the procedure for extracting or mining knowledge for the large quantity of data or we can say data mining is "knowledge mining for data" or also we can say Knowledge Discovery in Database (KDD). Means data mining is : data collection , database creation, data management, data analysis and understanding.

There are some steps in the process of knowledge discovery in database, such as

1. Data cleaning. (To remove nose and inconsistent data)

2. Data integration. (Where multiple data source may be combined.)

3. Data selection. (Where data relevant to the analysis task are retrieved from the database.)

4. Data transformation. (Where data are transformed or consolidated into forms appropriate for mining by performing summary or aggregation operations, for instance)

5. Data mining. (An essential process where intelligent methods are applied in order to extract data patterns.)

6. Pattern evaluation. (To identify the truly interesting patterns representing knowledge based on some interesting measures.)

7. Knowledge presentation.(Where visualization and knowledge representation techniques are used to present the mined knowledge to the user.)

Data Warehouse:

A data warehouse is a repository of information collected from multiple sources, stored under a unified schema and which usually resides at a single site.

Text:

Most of the banks and financial institutions offer a wide verity of banking services such as checking, savings, business and individual customer transactions, credit and investment services like mutual funds etc. Some also offer insurance services and stock investment services.

There are different types of analysis available, but in this case we want to give one analysis known as "Evolution Analysis".

Data evolution analysis is used for the object whose behavior changes over time. Although this may include characterization, discrimination, association, classification, or clustering of time related data, means we can say this evolution analysis is done through the time series data analysis, sequence or periodicity pattern matching and similarity based data analysis.

Data collect from banking and financial sectors are often relatively complete, reliable and high quality, which gives the facility for analysis and data mining. Here we discuss few cases such as,

Eg, 1. Suppose we have stock market data of the last few years available. And we would like to invest in shares of best companies. A data mining study of stock exchange data may identify stock evolution regularities for overall stocks and for the stocks of particular companies. Such regularities may help predict future trends in stock market prices, contributing our decision making regarding stock investments.

Eg, 2. One may like to view the debt and revenue change by month, by region and by other factors along with minimum, maximum, total, average, and other statistical information. Data ware houses, give the facility for comparative analysis and outlier analysis all are play important roles in financial data analysis and mining.

Eg, 3. Loan payment prediction and customer credit analysis are critical to the business of the bank. There are many factors can strongly influence loan payment performance and customer credit rating. Data mining may help identify important factors and eliminate irrelevant one.

Factors related to the risk of loan payments like term of the loan, debt ratio, payment to income ratio, credit history and many more. The banks than decide whose profile shows relatively low risks according to the critical factor analysis.

We can perform the task faster and create a more sophisticated presentation with financial analysis software. These products condense complex data analyses into easy-to-understand graphic presentations. And there's a bonus: Such software can vault our practice to a more advanced business consulting level and help we attract new clients.

To help us find a program that best fits our needs-and our budget-we examined some of the leading packages that represent, by vendors' estimates, more than 90% of the market. Although all the packages are marketed as financial analysis software, they don't all perform every function needed for full-spectrum analyses. It should allow us to provide a unique service to clients.

The Products:

ACCPAC CFO (Comprehensive Financial Optimizer) is designed for small and medium-size enterprises and can help make business-planning decisions by modeling the impact of various options. This is accomplished by demonstrating the what-if outcomes of small changes. A roll forward feature prepares budgets or forecast reports in minutes. The program also generates a financial scorecard of key financial information and indicators.

Customized Financial Analysis by BizBench provides financial benchmarking to determine how a company compares to others in its industry by using the Risk Management Association (RMA) database. It also highlights key ratios that need improvement and year-to-year trend analysis. A unique function, Back Calculation, calculates the profit targets or the appropriate asset base to support existing sales and profitability. Its DuPont Model Analysis demonstrates how each ratio affects return on equity.

Financial Analysis CS reviews and compares a client's financial position with business peers or industry standards. It also can compare multiple locations of a single business to determine which are most profitable. Users who subscribe to the RMA option can integrate with Financial Analysis CS, which then lets them provide aggregated financial indicators of peers or industry standards, showing clients how their businesses compare.

iLumen regularly collects a client's financial information to provide ongoing analysis. It also provides benchmarking information, comparing the client's financial performance with industry peers. The system is Web-based and can monitor a client's performance on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis. The network can upload a trial balance file directly from any accounting software program and provide charts, graphs and ratios that demonstrate a company's performance for the period. Analysis tools are viewed through customized dashboards.

PlanGuru by New Horizon Technologies can generate client-ready integrated balance sheets, income statements and cash-flow statements. The program includes tools for analyzing data, making projections, forecasting and budgeting. It also supports multiple resulting scenarios. The system can calculate up to 21 financial ratios as well as the breakeven point. PlanGuru uses a spreadsheet-style interface and wizards that guide users through data entry. It can import from Excel, QuickBooks, Peachtree and plain text files. It comes in professional and consultant editions. An add-on, called the Business Analyzer, calculates benchmarks.

ProfitCents by Sageworks is Web-based, so it requires no software or updates. It integrates with QuickBooks, CCH, Caseware, Creative Solutions and Best Software applications. It also provides a wide variety of businesses analyses for nonprofits and sole proprietorships. The company offers free consulting, training and customer support. It's also available in Spanish.

ProfitSystem fx Profit Driver by CCH Tax and Accounting provides a wide range of financial diagnostics and analytics. It provides data in spreadsheet form and can calculate benchmarking against industry standards. The program can track up to 40 periods.


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PDF Scraping: Making Modern File Formats More Accessible

Data scraping is the process of automatically sorting through information contained on the internet inside html, PDF or other documents and collecting relevant information to into databases and spreadsheets for later retrieval. On most websites, the text is easily and accessibly written in the source code but an increasing number of businesses are using Adobe PDF format (Portable Document Format: A format which can be viewed by the free Adobe Acrobat software on almost any operating system. See below for a link.). The advantage of PDF format is that the document looks exactly the same no matter which computer you view it from making it ideal for business forms, specification sheets, etc.; the disadvantage is that the text is converted into an image from which you often cannot easily copy and paste. PDF Scraping is the process of data scraping information contained in PDF files. To PDF scrape a PDF document, you must employ a more diverse set of tools.

There are two main types of PDF files: those built from a text file and those built from an image (likely scanned in). Adobe's own software is capable of PDF scraping from text-based PDF files but special tools are needed for PDF scraping text from image-based PDF files. The primary tool for PDF scraping is the OCR program. OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, programs scan a document for small pictures that they can separate into letters. These pictures are then compared to actual letters and if matches are found, the letters are copied into a file. OCR programs can perform PDF scraping of image-based PDF files quite accurately but they are not perfect.

Once the OCR program or Adobe program has finished PDF scraping a document, you can search through the data to find the parts you are most interested in. This information can then be stored into your favorite database or spreadsheet program. Some PDF scraping programs can sort the data into databases and/or spreadsheets automatically making your job that much easier.

Quite often you will not find a PDF scraping program that will obtain exactly the data you want without customization. Surprisingly a search on Google only turned up one business, (the amusingly named ScrapeGoat.com http://www.ScrapeGoat.com) that will create a customized PDF scraping utility for your project. A handful of off the shelf utilities claim to be customizable, but seem to require a bit of programming knowledge and time commitment to use effectively. Obtaining the data yourself with one of these tools may be possible but will likely prove quite tedious and time consuming. It may be advisable to contract a company that specializes in PDF scraping to do it for you quickly and professionally.

Let's explore some real world examples of the uses of PDF scraping technology. A group at Cornell University wanted to improve a database of technical documents in PDF format by taking the old PDF file where the links and references were just images of text and changing the links and references into working clickable links thus making the database easy to navigate and cross-reference. They employed a PDF scraping utility to deconstruct the PDF files and figure out where the links were. They then could create a simple script to re-create the PDF files with working links replacing the old text image.

A computer hardware vendor wanted to display specifications data for his hardware on his website. He hired a company to perform PDF scraping of the hardware documentation on the manufacturers' website and save the PDF scraped data into a database he could use to update his webpage automatically.

PDF Scraping is just collecting information that is available on the public internet. PDF Scraping does not violate copyright laws.

PDF Scraping is a great new technology that can significantly reduce your workload if it involves retrieving information from PDF files. Applications exist that can help you with smaller, easier PDF Scraping projects but companies exist that will create custom applications for larger or more intricate PDF Scraping jobs.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?PDF-Scraping:-Making-Modern-File-Formats-More-Accessible&id=193321