Large amounts of data are scanned from paper sources into electronic sources. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software is imperfect, as are the paper sources being scanned, resulting in scanned copies that are often flawed.
When attempting to match current system data to a scanned copy, it can be useful to use the SIMILAR() function to enhance the chances of matching items. As discussed earlier, this is because the SIMILAR() function replaces alpha characters with their numeric equivalents (1 for I, 0 for O, etc.), which addresses the exact problem faced by converting paper copies to electronic data using OCR software.