>this customer had two main suppliers, there are only 2 in the country and they know it. neither will provide an electronic format of the data so that they cannot be played off each other. the pages in question have a listing of about 5 columns including the description, price, code, second code. there are lots of pages, several hundred, so i am trying to find a scanning option that will get the data into excel
>~M

As far as I know from my experience with several scanners, they all have software in the package that includes OCR and converters to transfer the scanned document to variety of editors including Word and Excel.
Most often the problem is not with OCR, but with ability for user to position the original sheet of paper properly aligned in the scanner bed.

In any case I believe that the final Excel file will need to be reformatted to have data distributed properly across columns.

Good Luck