How to convert a scanned document to Word. How to convert a scanned document into Word format

Those people who actively work with documents and other textual information clearly see the need for scanning various materials. It is important to remember that to obtain high-quality documents, the presence of a scanner is not discussed at all. However, in certain situations, a photograph of the required text may also work, but the photograph must also be of high quality.

How to scan a document in Word

First of all, the document is scanned. For this case, it is better to choose the png or jpg format. The image size must also be impressive (from 400 dpi) so that there are no problems with recognition.
The resulting images are saved in a specific location, after which the text recognition program itself will be required. It is best to choose Adobe FineReader. This is a universal software that does not cause any complaints in terms of the quality of its work. It is important to note that after installing this program, the corresponding tab should appear in MS Word, therefore, using the functionality is significantly simplified.
Through Adobe FineReader, you need to select the “File” and “Open” menu item, select the necessary images. Next, the image processing menu will appear, we need to select the language that is used in the document, as well as some other options, including dictionaries and other settings (not so important for obtaining the result).
Click the “Recognize” button and wait for the process to complete. It is likely that not everything is recognized, so those words that the program could not identify will be highlighted in a different color and can be edited directly in the program.

If the text in the scanned document itself is slightly shifted, then in Adobe FineReader you need to select certain paragraphs of text using selection. This will ensure that the text is not missed during recognition.
As a result, you need to click on the “Save” button, after which you will be able to choose where to save the document, as well as its format. Of course, in the case of MS Word you need to choose the doc or docx extension.
If before saving it turns out that the document is divided into several columns, then you need to select the “Format” menu, then go to “Columns” and select “Single” so that the document looks simple and harmonious. Also in “Page Settings” there is the ability to customize margins, indents and fonts.

As a result, the document can be freely edited directly in the MS Office office suite. It is important to note that when recognizing a document directly in Word, formatting is even simpler, since the functionality is the same for both the source documents and the ones being recognized.

As for recognition from photographs or other materials, it is not so easy to obtain high quality recognition, since we are talking about displaced margins, indents and other details of documents, which will require a lot of time to correct.

How to convert a scanned document to Microsoft Word format?

Have you ever encountered a situation where you wanted to change the contents of a scanned file and were unable to do so? Now you can do it instantly by simply changing the file format. This article provides steps on how to convert a scanned document to Microsoft Word.

When you scan a document or scanner, it offers you a list of formats in which you can save the file. However, as a rule, further editing of the file is not possible. If you need to change the contents of a file, you will have to go through the tedious process of rewriting or rescanning the document. You can save time and effort by simply changing a few settings on your computer. This way you will receive a scanned document in .doc format, which you can then edit.

Note: To edit, you must first install Microsoft Office Document Imaging.

How to do it?

For Windows 7 or Vista users:

Start-Control Panel-Programs-Programs and Features

For Windows XP users:

Start-Control Panel-Add or Remove Programs-Change or Remove Programs
In the list of programs that appears, find Microsoft Office and right-click on it. From the drop-down menu that opens, select Change

You will be redirected to the Change Installation window. Select " Add or remove components " and press the button.

Continue Select the Office Tools option there and find Microsoft Office Document Imaging in the list that opens. Right-click and select from the list that opens, and press " and press the button(Update)

Microsoft Office Document Imaging is now installed and ready to use.

Create a Word Document

If you already have a scanned document, simply open it in Paint. If not, in the same program, select File-From Scanner or Camera in the menu and start the scanning process. Since you are scanning a document for a text file, in the scanner settings window, select the option Black and white drawing or text. After the document is scanned, open it in Paint.

Select Start - All Programs - Microsoft Office - Microsoft Office Tools - Microsoft Office Document Imaging

In the program window, select the menu item File-Open, find the tiff file we created earlier in the dialog box that opens, and open it

Now you need to select the text contained in it. To do this, press the key combination CTRL+A and then CTRL+C to copy the text to the clipboard.

Create a new document in Microsoft Word, and press CTRL+V to paste the text you copied earlier. Then, through the File-Save As item, save the file with the extension .doc.

Thus, the Word document is created. Now all that remains is to make changes to it if necessary.

Once you've finished searching for a document, you can open the document in Word to edit it. How to do this depends on the version of Office you have installed.

Scan a document to PDF and edit in Word

Advice: The conversion works best with documents that contain primarily text.

Scan the document according to the scanner instructions and save it on your computer as a PDF file.

In Word, select file > Open.

Navigate to the desired PDF file on your computer and click Open.

A message appears indicating that Word will convert the PDF file to an editable Word document. Click the button OK.

Step 1: Install Microsoft Office Imaging Document

Quit all programs.

Advice: We recommend that you print this section before closing all programs.

Open Control Panel: Right-click the Start button and then select Control Panel or enter Control Panel in the Windows search box.

On control panels click Programs, and then - Programs and components.

Right-click the name of the edition of Microsoft Office installed, or right-click Microsoft Office Word 2007(depending on whether Word is installed as part of Office or as a separate program) and click Change.

Select Select " and then click the button Continue.

In chapter Installation options Click the plus sign (+) next to the component Office Tools.

Click the arrow next to the component Microsoft Office Document Imaging, select an option Select the Office Tools option there and find Microsoft Office Document Imaging in the list that opens. Right-click and select from the list that opens and then click the button Continue.

Step 2: Create a document that can be edited

Scan the document following the instructions for your scanner.

Before you continue, convert the resulting file to TIFF format. To do this, you can use Paint or another similar program.

You now have a document that can be edited. Don't forget to save the new file so you don't lose your changes.

Microsoft Office's Word text editor is installed on most users' computers. This is a convenient and practical program for typing and editing any information. The only annoying thing is that using such software it is almost impossible to open files that differ in format from doc. When this is necessary, the question arises: how to translate it into Word? A number of programs cope with this task quite simply. The most popular of them is Fine Reader. In a matter of seconds, it recognizes texts in various languages from images and easily translates them into doc format.

Program for scanned documents No. 1

The user does not need to have a scanner at hand. FineReader is a tool with which anyone can easily solve the problem of how to transfer a scanned document into Word from a flash drive, digital camera or mobile phone. The user just needs to connect the gadget to the computer and launch the program.

Interface and available tasks

After starting the program, the computer monitor will display a menu logically arranged by commands. FineReader's main tasks include:

saving the document in Word;
converting images from PDF to doc format;
just scan and save the image;
create a searchable PDF document;
moving photos to Word.

At this stage, the user can configure the color mode: color or monochrome, and recognition languages. The following languages are available for processing: English, Russian, Spanish, Italian, German. The user can also use a selection of artificially created languages: Esperanto, Interlingua, IDO.

If the user is faced with the task of scanning a document containing, for example, medical text, then the program will recognize the Latin font after the required checkbox is ticked. FineReader also sees formal languages. It successfully copes with the recognition of simple chemical formulas. A user who often works with documents in different languages can save his time by using the automatic settings feature.

An example of how to transfer a scanned document into Word

Let's consider the simplest problem. We have a document in Russian, scanned and saved on a flash drive. To transfer it to a Word document, you need to:

Launch the Abby FineReader program.
Insert the drive into the USB connector of the computer.
Select the “File in Word” menu item.
In the Explorer window that opens, specify the path to the image that needs to be converted.
Double-right-click on the selected file.

After all the above steps, the program begins to work independently. The FineReader window will then be divided into three columns. The first one will display all pages of the document. In the column located in the middle, the user can see which program is currently working with. The leftmost column remains empty during the recognition process.

Upon completion of work, the converted document automatically opens in Word. The user can only edit the text in those places where FineReader could not recognize the text and save it on his computer or flash drive.

Errors

It is clear that to the question of how to transfer a scanned document to Word, the answer turned out to be quite simple. But is everything always so rosy? Often the images are low resolution. And then FineReader gives an error instead of a finished file in doc format. But there is no reason to be upset. Many reasons that interfere with text recognition can be eliminated using the same FineReader. To do this, the program has a menu of “Edit” commands. By selecting it, the user has the opportunity to:

change resolution;
correct skewed scanned image;
adjust brightness and contrast;
crop, split and rotate a document and much more.

Scanner, Document, FineReader

Speaking about the functionality of the program for text recognition, I would like to say separately about the ability to work with various office equipment and gadgets. So, installing FineReader on the device’s hard drive eliminates the question for the user - how to scan a document to a computer?

The fact is that one device driver is not always enough to operate any office equipment. The scanner is no exception. As a rule, a disk with a program is included with it, which ensures operation of the device. But the functionality of such software is often limited.

FineReader is compatible with all scanners from well-known manufacturers. By installing it on your computer, the user can use this program as software for working with images. Documents can be simply scanned and saved; set the command to leave the captured image directly in Word; create PDF files. From them, translate texts into the Microsoft Office text editor. As a result, one small program can easily cope with such a task as scanning a document onto a computer, and can replace cumbersome graphic tools, while ensuring the smooth operation of the entire office.

If you have chosen the fast way of writing a theoretical chapter, which we talked about in paragraph 2.1., most likely you will not be able to do without scanning documents. Otherwise, you can skip this point and start taking notes on materials found in the library.

Before you start scanning, you need to decide what exactly you want to use when writing your work. And to do this, you first need to look through the available literature and highlight the necessary points with a pencil.

The first time I scanned a magazine article for my first coursework, I found the task incredibly difficult. As a result of several hours of working with the scanner and FineReader, the output was nonsense that could not be edited. In the end, I had to type everything by hand. To prevent this from happening to you, let’s take a closer look at all the technical aspects of scanning.

To scan, we will, of course, need a scanner. You don't have to buy it. You can, for example, borrow something from a friend for a while. I use a CanoScan Lide 60 scanner. Although this is not the newest model, I really like this compact, fast and easy-to-use “device”. If you borrow a scanner, in order for it to work, you must first install the driver program. Drivers and installation instructions can always be found on the installation disk that comes with the device or downloaded from the manufacturer’s website. After installing the driver, connect the scanner to your computer using the connecting cord. Now you can start scanning directly.

But first, a little theory. You should know that the scanning process consists of two stages:

1. Directly scanning the document. At this stage, the scanner takes a photo of the surface of the document being scanned and saves the resulting image to the computer as a regular .jpg .gif file or in another format;

2. Document recognition. This is the process of converting text from an image taken by a scanner into a regular test, which can then be saved in Word and edited. Recognition is carried out without the participation of a scanner, using a special program (the most popular is Adobe FineReader). This way, you can first scan several sheets of text and save them as an image before converting them to text.

So, let's begin stage one - scanning:

– launch the scanner driver: Start - All Programs - Canon - ScanGear(I indicate the driver name for my scanner). The driver window will appear:

– open the scanner lid and place a book, magazine or copy thereof with the text facing down, as evenly as possible in relation to the edges of the scanner’s working surface:

It is very important here to ensure that the scanner lid presses the scanned document as tightly as possible, preventing external light from reaching the working surface of the scanner that is in contact with the document;

– make the necessary settings in the scanner driver. The first step is to set the resolution at which the document will be scanned. Resolution is an indicator that determines the level of detail of an object when scanning and is determined in dots per inch (dpi, or dpi). The higher the resolution, the better the image quality. But, when scanning text documents, there is no point in setting the maximum resolution, since this will be of zero use. In addition, scanning at higher resolutions takes longer. I recommend setting the resolution between 400-500 dpi. With this setting, the images are of sufficient quality for good recognition, and the scanning process itself does not take much time. I suggest looking at a screenshot of my printer settings:

First you need to go to “Advanced mode”. The source will always be "Tablet"(flatbed scanner). It is better to set the color mode “Black and white”, because we don’t need colors to scan text, and this will reduce the size of the output images. The resolution, as I said, should be set 400 dpi. Output image size – required “A4”. Now you can safely press the button "Scan". My scanner is designed in such a way that it first stores the scanned images in the internal memory, and only when closing the driver window does it offer to save them to the computer. All I have to do is indicate the location where the results of the work will be saved.

You should end up with files of this type:

When you enlarge such an image, the text should be clearly visible.

Second phase – recognition received images and convert them into text. As I already said, this will require a special program - FineReader. Download the program from this link (32MB). Archive password – website. The version I propose does not require installation (portable). There will be many different files in the program folder, but you only need one - FineReader.exe. Double clicking on this file will launch the program on your computer.

This version of the program is quite old. I took all the screenshots below using it. If this version FineReader it doesn't work for you - choose a newer one.

Window FineReader has the following form:

After setting the language in which the documents you previously scanned were printed, you can begin recognition. If the text contains two languages at once (for example, Russian and English), make the installation accordingly.

To start recognition, click on the arrow to the right of the first button Scan- and then - Open image:

The image selection window will open. Open the folder where you saved the scanned images, click CTRL+A(English) on the keyboard and press the button Open.

After that on the left in the window FineReader Thumbnails of the added files will appear, in the center - the currently selected thumbnail in an enlarged form, below - an even larger enlargement, and on the right the recognition result:

For example, I took only two images. The first of them is highlighted in the screenshot above; we can recognize it now. As you can see, the image was scanned vertically; in order to recognize the text, the image must first be rotated 90 degrees. To do this, use the and buttons. The next step is to tell the program which part of the image needs to be recognized, and also set the type of data that should be output: text, table or image. There are buttons for this, respectively: . For example, if you need to mark a text block, left-click on , then left-click in the upper left corner of the text block and, holding the left button, drag it to the lower right corner. For example, I have fully prepared one image for recognition:

As you can see, all the text blocks in the example above are highlighted in green, and the pictures are highlighted in red. Tables are prepared for recognition in the same way. This is what the button is for. To move to the next photo, left-click on its thumbnail on the left. In this way, all images obtained as a result of scanning are prepared for recognition. After the preparation of the images is completed, you should select them all. To do this, left-click in an empty space on the thumbnail panel (it’s called Plastic bag) and press Ctrl+A(English) on the keyboard. Next, click on the button and wait until FineReader converts images to text. After this, you can save the resulting text in Word using the button, after clicking on which a window will open. In it you need to select the format for saving - Microsoft Word, and also check the box so that all pages are saved:

After pressing the button OK the program will create a Word document and insert text from the recognized pages into it in the order in which they are located in the thumbnail panel (Batch). Immediately save the resulting document to a folder in the file structure of your thesis and you can begin editing. How this is done is described in my free course.

And one last point. If you scanned a newspaper or magazine, the text there is often given in the form of columns (as in the example above). These columns in Word need to be converted into one. Select the text in columns and run the command: Format – Columns – One – OK. Only after this can you set Portrait orientation in Page Setup, margin padding, font, etc.

How to scan a document and recognize it in MS Word