File processing of native file formats

[0019]The present disclosure provides a system and a set of methods wherein data or information is extracted from a collection of documents provided in a number of different electronic formats. The system of the present disclosure directly consumes virtually any native file format documents, extracts information and data from the documents, formats and stores the extracted information or data for subsequent processing.

[0020]The method of the present disclosure includes a configuration sub-method and a runtime sub-method. The configuration sub-method allows a user a) to visually identify elements and / or regions on a received document (in virtually any native file format) using an advanced or a specialized viewer and b) to associate the identified elements and / or regions with fields to be output by the system. The configuration sub-method also includes storing, for each electronic document, the regions of interest and their associations with corresponding defined output fields. The r