HOW TO: Make PDFs Searchable (OCR) Using Power Automate

[vanderben]

Hi All!

I know that many of you have had some challenges with PDFs not being searchable inside of SharePoint, so I wanted to share how you can make PDFs searchable using Adobe PDF Tools connector in Microsoft Power Automate. Among other features, it allows you to make PDFs searchable so I wanted to share.

How do I know if my PDF isn’t searchable?

There is an easy test to figure out whether PDFs are searchable. Open your PDF in Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you can’t select the text in the PDF, you can’t search the document. If you can, then it probably is already searchable.

What You Will Need

· Adobe PDF Tools (you can get a free trial here. Note: you can get a free 6 month trial.)

· Microsoft Power Automate (you will need premium licensing to take advantage of PDF Tools)

Create your Adobe PDF Tools credentials

If you haven’t already created credentials to use with your Adobe PDF Tools, you can create them here.

Once you supply a name and description, your client credentials will be generated. Keep this window open; you will need this information to create a connection in Microsoft Power Automate.

Create a flow from a template

Adobe PDF Tools has a variety of templates pre-created to make it easy for you to get started. We are going to use one of these for this example.

1. Log into Microsoft Power Automate.

2. Use this template to get started.

3. You will need to create a connection to PDF Tools. Use the credentials you created earlier.

4. Click Create.

Now that you have all your connections, you only need to make a few changes to get this template working.

5. In your trigger called When a file is created in a folder, set the Site Address to the SharePoint site you want to reference.

6. In the Folder Id, set the path to the folder you want Microsoft Power Automate to watch to generate the OCR PDF.

7. Scroll down to the Create file action and set your Site Address and Folder Id to the specified place where you want the generated documents to go.

Pro Tip: If you want to dynamically decide where the generated documents can go, you can use Dynamic Content to use variables to decide the path. Here is a helpful video to learn more about that.

See it in action

That’s it! Now give it a try by placing a file in the Input folder. Microsoft SharePoint is not instantaneous when triggering a flow, so you might need to wait 30–60 seconds before it reacts and triggers the flow.

If you don’t want to wait that long, use the Test button in your flow before you drop the files in. This will trigger it to process faster.

Search for Files in SharePoint

Now that you have that file in an indexable PDF format, try searching the contents of that document in SharePoint using search. After SharePoint indexes the file, you will then find that document found in your search results, making it easier to find your content even if it was physically scanned.

There you have it! Would love to hear people's thoughts and if this is helpful. Also would love to hear any feedback!