Released: OCR Pack

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I’m surprised the change affected you, it shouldn’t have, if you wrapped the formula in a ModifyRows() action like you said

And why are you on a different account, I’m afraid it looks like this might not be the real Shishir, please make a comment with @shishir to prove me wrong

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Ha, that’s me still working through the process of merging new accounts. It’s me :slight_smile:

Re the breaking change - it’s unlikely it broke others, I was doing something a bit fancy!

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Ah fair enough, good to hear! :blush:

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@Rickard_Abraham I love the pack! It’s made our lives a lot easier when it comes to managing contracts. We often receive scanned copies back from customers and it can be a pain to extract information, especially if there are special or unique terms that we should keep in mind.

Right now, I’m using the OCR pack in combination with your Google Drive Extra Pack and it’s helped us build several powerful workflows. As an example, we’ve used those two packs along with a custom AI pack to create easy to consume contract summaries for our team. We have a few button columns that extract text and then call a llm to summarize it.

Unfortunately, we’ve run into some issues keeping up a consistent workflow because Coda’s “push all buttons” automation stops completely when it encounters its first error, rather than continuing to process the remaining buttons in the sequence.

With that in mind, I have two feature requests or rather a ‘wishlist’ of sorts:

File size metadata: For the Google Drive Extra pack, could you add a function that allows the users to extract the file size?

I’d like a function that accepts a Google Drive link and returns the file size. The output should be in a standard unit like bytes, as the Drive API’s size representation (e.g., “2 MB”, “2 KB”) isn’t consistently usable.

  • One of the common issues I run into is that we’ll try to download a file from drive that is over the 4mb limit which throws an error. Because of that, our automations or “push all buttons” buttons fail from time to time and I have to manually add an exclude from filter checkbox.
  • Unfortunately Coda’s Google Drive Pack doesn’t provide file size despite providing some metadata.
  • Today I have a n8n workflow that pastes the file size into my document, but I’d love to drop that workflow entirely and keep everything in Coda.
  • All I’d need is a function that takes the drive link and exports the file size in bytes or some common format, since the Drive API returns file sizes as “2 MB” or “2 KB”

Page Count: Similar to my ask above, I’d love it if there was a function that could output the number of pages in a document. This could be part of your OCR pack, PDF Pack, or Google Drive Extra - I don’t mind.

  • The other issue I run into often is that a document has too many pages and throws an error with the OCR pack, even if the file size is under 4mb. I’m not sure why this happens, but on occasion we’ll have document with 40+ pages. It’s rare, but again the automations (pushing all buttons) stop the first time they encounter an issue.
  • I view this as a way to pre-filter potentially problematic rows for someone from our team to investigate separately.

Happy to expand on these more. We’re definitely happy with the existing features, but I’d imagine these would also be use ful for other users of your pack(s).

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Hey @Chris_Williams,
I’m excited to read your post, and it sounds like you’ve made some awesome workflows!

Google Drive file size

This is a great idea, I’ll take a look this week to see if I can add it!

Page Count

My PDF pack already has PageCountPDFs()! I’m afraid you might’ve missed it :pray:

Allowing Errors

I don’t know of any good ways to allow errors either, would be nice to have

OCR Pack AI

Have you also tried to AI features inside the pack?

  • Entering the prompt parameter in the Scan() action, or
  • ScanToRows(), which can create coda rows directly

But since you’re having issues with too many pages sometimes, this could get a little tricky.
A possible solution would be to split the PDF with PageSelectPDF() in the PDF pack, but then you might lose valuable context if split on an unfortunate page.

The Google Document AI v2.0 engine will handle 40 pages with ease though! Downside is you can’t give it a prompt

Have you set the output parameter when you scan those 40+ pages that error sometimes, and to what, if so?

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Great, that sounds good!

Wow, I’m not sure how that happened. That should definitely work for us and help solve one of our challenges.

Ah, so yes we’ve looked into the AI features in the pack. The page count issue was the primary reason we created a separate custom pack to make the calls to the llm. We’ll revisit this though because our preference is always to use fewer packs and steps where we can. It makes it much easier to troubleshoot.

I appreciate the quick response, the Coda team should really highlight your pack(s) in the Docket or another marketing channel given the practical applications for many businesses and of course the praise from @Shishir_Mehrotra @Shishir_Mehrotra.

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  • I’ve updated Google Drive Extra, read more here!
  • I also asked Coda if we can increase the size limit from 4 MB :pray:

Thank you again @Chris_Williams!

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@Rickard_Abraham Fantastic, thank you!

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New OpenAI models!

  • o1 (Vision functionality)
  • o3-mini (Only text)

Also, o1-mini (Only text) is now a third the cost

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