OCR (“optical character recognition”) is the well-known technique that allows extracting text from images and scanned documents and outputting it to digital formats that can be used by any computer software. Free OCR to Word is a handy application that helps you take advantage of the OCR technique and create MS Word documents from the text extracted from scanned images. It supports inputting numerous formats of scanned images, including JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, ICO, EMF, PCX, and many other more. Even PSD Photoshop documents are supported, and some video formats. Then it helps you locate the editable text using various image manipulation utilities like a selection tool, a rotating function, or a zooming feature. Anyway, Free OCR to Word can already automatically recognize specific areas in an input image, therefore the manual selection of the text areas will often not even be required. Once the text is detected and selected, it can be saved to a TXT text file or copied to a new Word document which will be automatically opened when this action is requested.
Free OCR to Word comes with a pretty simple interface that makes use of two side-by-side panels which let you easily compare and process the text selections. Clicking one of the panels will change the buttons of the main menu, among ones with image-related functions and the ones with text-related functions. Unfortunately there was no hint or explanation to warn me about this characteristic of the interface and I was rather lucky to discover it by myself. I wouldn’t have found the important button that actually allows sending the extracted text to a new Word document. The interface is simple, but not enough intuitive or self-explanatory.
In terms of accuracy, the application performed really well at detecting the text areas from a scanned image. It would have been nicer if it had featured a spell checker as well, as often OCR applications have trouble extracting the text flawlessly and without spell errors.
A good thing about this powerful tool is the fact that it can work directly with a scanner and process the scanned images and documents on-the-go, as they’re being scanned. For a free tool, it offers plenty of undeniable advantages and its few downsides are actually rather unimportant. I can only recommend this great app.
Convert, watermark, and extract images from various common document types.
Straightforward utility to convert Office, HTML, and PDF files between formats.
Uses Optical Character Recognition to recover the text from your image files.
Converts PDF file into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, EPUB, CSV, and others.
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