BUILDING AN OCR APPLICATION USING APPSHEET
BUILDING AN OCR APPLICATION USING APPSHEET
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What is This About?
This is a short tutorial on how we can build a basic, real-time OCR (Optical Character Recognition) application from scratch using the powerful combination of Google Sheets, AppSheet, and Google Cloud Vision AI. Learn how to automate data entry process and turn any paper document, receipt, or invoice into structured data instantly. This step-by-step guide is perfect for business owners, citizen developers, and anyone looking to streamline their workflows with low-code automation.
General summary on the process as below:
Build a custom Appsheet mobile or desktop application to capture image of the bill/invoice, etc.
When a new entry is added (via image capture or upload), it triggers an automation which calls an Apps Script function that sends this image to GCP's Cloud Vision AI engine that runs the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process.
This returns a string of all texts recognized from the image, which then is processed by an Apps Script function to identify the relevant texts.
This relevant texts are then updated in Google Sheets database. Necessary edits can be performed if needed.
Who Can Benefit From This?
Skill level: Mid to high level.
Example use cases:
Finance department processing routine vendor invoices.
Staff processing monthly expenses such as utilities.
Team leaders looking for simple low code ways to automate data entry process.
Tools Used:
Google Sheets: the database used to store the information.
Google Drive: store captured images & sheets.
Google Apps Script: to come up with the automation that links all together - call the OCR engine, process the output, and update the sheets.
Google Cloud Console's Cloud Vision API: to process the image and extract the texts.
Google Gemini: to "vibe code" the JavaScript code needed for Apps Script.
Introduction and demonstration:
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