There is provided a computing device and method to perform a data transfer using a document. Data to define at least one parameter of a data transfer is defined from data in the document. The document may have text characters or images of text characters (or both) for the data. A GUI may display the document and receive input to identify the data and define the at least one parameter. The document image may be processed to determine the text characters such as by OCR. The document may be a photo (image) captured by a camera on or coupled to the computing device. A GUI may be defined to provide workflow to define the data transfer signal such as a message. Functionality to capture text characters from documents, particularly images, may be added to applications such as via a plug in or otherwise.