Do you own and use a business card scanner and software?

Why wouldn’t a printer / scanner work? Also if you build a data base using Access or Excel (I prefer Excel) in which to store this information you can search it that way.

What exactly is it you need to do? I might be able to help.

For most scanning, I use my phone. I used a couple of portable scanners but gave it up many years ago when phone apps surpassed them.

Microsoft Office Lens has specific business card features

This sort of device will digitalize all the information listed on a business card – the person’s name, title, company, and contact information. After each card has been scanned, the user can add any useful comments (“Bill Jackson’s friend” or “met at the Scholarship Fund 2017 gala” or “cute red shoes”). The resulting, searchable database is created automatically, not through manual entry.

So are you looking for something that will actually read the text on the card and give you search results based on that?

As the card is scanned, the related software digitalizes its information. The user can then search the database for any detail.

A year later, the user can find “that guy I met at last summer’s XYZ conference, who gave me his copy of New Yorker magazine.”

As I mentioned in my OP, there’s a number of such devices available for purchase. I just want to buy a good version.

But wouldn’t you have to manually key in any information that isn’t on the card? In the example above, you’d have to at least key in XYZ Conference for it to be searchable in the future?

_But wouldn’t you have to manually key in any information that isn’t on the card? _

And you won’t have to type in name, company, title, address, phone and email. Scan and ta da! they’re in your contacts.

That didn’t answer my question @Call_Me_Jay. If she wanted to include information that was not on the card, and be able to search by that extra information, she’d have to manually add it, right?

Yes, of course, the scanner isn’t adding info not on the card.

But wherever it stores the info (contacts, OneNote, Excel, whatever) you can add notes. On a phone you could do it by voice.

Which makes me think – if the goal is contact management, I would pick a contact manager first and then a card scanning solution.

Here’s a review – Best CRM Software 2019 – Customer relationship management (CRM) software

Their top pick, Zoho, has its own card scanning app.