When dealing with text documents, you often have to type in long documents just because you have misplaced/lost the original word document or you were not provided the original word document. This could waste a lot of your valuable time. So let me teach you a way to save time and all that typing.

In this tutorial i will be exploring Microsoft’s OCR feature. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. Which basically means converting text in images to editable text documents (eg: Word Document). If you would like to read more about OCR please follow this link.

I will be using Microsoft Office 2007 for this tutorial. Unlike previous versions of Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office 2007 does not include OCR features with the default installation. So it is very likely that you would have to install this feature. If you already have OCR installed, please skip these steps to How to Convert Image to Text (see below).

Install OCR

To begin, open Control Panel from Start Menu.

From the Control Panel open Add or Remove Programs.

From Add or Remove Programs find “Microsoft Office 2007″ (The version i have installed is small business edition, but you may have a different version installed). Once you find it, click “Change”

This will open up Microsoft Office setup and you would be presented with 3 options. Select Add or Remove Features and click Continue (Administrative rights is required for this).

You will be presented with Installation Options. From the list look for Microsoft Office Documents Imaging under Office Tools. Click the little arrow and select Run all from My Computer and click Continue. This will start the installation process.

When the installation finishes click Close. Now you have successfully installed OCR features on your computer.

How to Convert Image to Text

Now that we have installed OCR capability, lets make some use of it shall we. For the tutorial i will use a .TIFF image which i mage just for demonstration purpose.

To begin, open Microsoft Office Document Imaging (please refer to the image below)

Once the application is open. Goto File >> Open (or Ctrl + O) and select your text image.

When your image is open, goto Tools >> Send Text to Word, which will present you two dialogue boxes, which you can click OK

After a while a New Word Document will open with the text in your image.

There might be some problem with character recognition. Specially if it is in a non-standard font, OCR might have difficulty placing the correct character.

As always hope this one was helpful to you and that you would find it very useful. If you have any questions, please leave a comment and i will get back to you

Tags: applications, apps, howto, microsoft, microsoft word, office, windows

This entry was posted on Monday, December 28th, 2009 at 15:53 and is filed under microsoft, microsoft word, ocr, office, windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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