How to Convert From Scan to Word Document

Most companies have numerous documents stored in paper form that they need to convert into a digital format. They use scanners to digitize and upload those documents onto a PC or server, so they can be used electronically. But instead of converting the scanned scrap into a word document format, sometimes you might just want to convert it right away into the correct format and save the formatting of the document for later.

Have you ever scanned a document and then wanted to convert it from scan to word? It’s something that some people do regularly, especially when they work for the government. Scanning the documents first helps them to create backup copies of everything. But converting the scanned documents to a word file means they can be opened and edited whenever they need to. It also helps if you want to share them with someone else who wouldn’t be able to open a scanned document format.

A number of businesses rely on the use of old letterhead paper to draft memos and other important documents. However, some businesses have found that the production of these documents is tedious and time consuming. There are also businesses that may have employed individuals who are innovative and computer savvy, but are not well versed in network technology. This can also cause difficulties for companies in terms of converting scanned content into word documents.

Do you have a pile of old receipts, invoices, or other documents and need to convert them into something useful like Word documents? It’s not a fun task, but it is really simple to do. In this tutorial, we’ll teach you how to do that with Google’s free OCR tool. Backing up or maintaining your important paper documents can be a tedious task. But you can digitize those simply, easily and quickly by scanning them into your computer. Some people prefer to use an actual scanner for this process.

Converting a Scanned PDF

1. 1 Make sure your scanned document saved as a PDF. Microsoft Word can recognize and convert scanned PDF files into Word documents without requiring any additional software.^[1]
   • If your document saved as an image (e.g., a JPG or PNG file), you can use New OCR to convert it instead.
2. 2 Open the PDF in Word. This process will vary depending on your operating system:
   • Windows — Right-click the PDF you want to convert, select Open with, and click Word in the resulting pop-out menu.
   • Mac — Click the PDF you want to convert, click the File menu item, select Open With, and click Word in the pop-out menu.
3. 3 Click OK when prompted. Word will begin converting the scanned PDF into a Word document.
   • This process can take several minutes if your PDF has lots of text or images.
4. 4 Enable editing for the file if needed. If you see a yellow bar with a warning at the top of the Word window, click Enable Editing in the yellow bar in order to unlock the file for editing.
   • This usually only pertains to files you’ve downloaded (e.g., if you downloaded your scanned PDF from a cloud service).
5. 5 Clean up your document. Converting scanned files into Word documents isn’t an exact science; you may have to add missing words, remove excess spaces, and fix typos before your Word document is ready to go.
6. 6 Save the document. Once you’re ready to save the converted document as its own Word file, do the following:
   • Windows — Press Ctrl+S, then enter a file name, select a save location, and click Save.
   • Mac — Press ⌘ Command+S, then enter a file name, select a save location from the “Where” drop-down box, and click Save.

Method 2 Converting a Scanned Image

1. 1 Open the New OCR site. Go to http://www.newocr.com/ in your computer’s web browser.
2. 2 Click Choose file. It’s a grey button at the top of the page. Doing so prompts a File Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac) window to open.
3. 3 Select the scanned file. In the file browser, navigate to the scanned image file of your document, then click the file.
4. 4 Click Open. It’s in the bottom-right corner of the window. Doing so will prompt the file to upload to the website.
5. 5 Click Upload + OCR. You’ll find this button near the bottom of the visible page. New OCR will begin extracting the readable text from your scanned image.
6. 6 Scroll down and click Download. This link is in the lower-left side of the page, just above the box containing the document’s text. A drop-down menu will appear.
7. 7 Click Microsoft Word (DOC). It’s in the Download drop-down menu. This will prompt a Microsoft Word version of the scanned file to download onto your computer.
8. 8 Open the document. Once the file is done downloading, you can double-click it to open it in Microsoft Word. Your scanned image is now a Microsoft Word document.
   • You may have to click Enable Editing at the top of the page as the document might be locked by default.
9. 9 Clean up your document. Converting scanned files into Word documents isn’t an exact science; you may have to add missing words, remove excess spaces, and fix typos before your Word document is ready to go.

Method 3 Scanning a Document into a Word File

1. 1 Open Office Lens. Tap the Office Lens app icon, which resembles a red and white app with a camera iris and the letter “L” in the center of the icon.
   • If you don’t have Office Lens installed, you can download it from the Google Play Store for Android or from the App Store on iPhone.
2. 2 Allow Office Lens access to your phone. If this is your first time opening Office Lens, tap Allow or OK when prompted to allow Office Lens to access your phone’s files.
3. 3 Tap DOCUMENT. It’s a tab at the bottom of the screen.
4. 4 Point your phone’s camera at a document. Position the document that you want to scan inside the camera’s view.
   • Make sure you document is well lit so the camera can pick up as much detail as possible.
5. 5 Tap the “Capture” button. It’s a red circle at the bottom of the screen. This will take a photo of the document’s page.
6. 6 Tap . It’s in the bottom-right corner of the screen.
   • You can scan more pages by tapping the camera with the plus icon at the bottom of the screen.
7. 7 Tap Word. You’ll find this option in the “SAVE TO” section of the “Export To” page.
   • On Android, tap the box next to Word and then tap SAVE at the bottom of the screen.
8. 8 Sign into your Microsoft account. If you haven’t already, enter your Microsoft account email address and password. Once signed in, your Word document will be uploaded to your OneDrive account.
   • This must be the account that you use to log into Microsoft Word as well.
9. 9 Open Word on your computer. It’s the blue app with a white document and the letter “W” in the icon.
10. 10 Click Open Other Documents. It’s on the left side of the window below the “Recent” section.
    • On Mac, simply click the folder icon that says Open on the left-hand side of the window.
11. 11 Click OneDrive – Personal. It’s at the top of the window. This will open your OneDrive folder.
    • If you don’t see the OneDrive option, click + Add a Place, then click OneDrive and sign in with your Microsoft account.
12. 12 Go to the Office Lens folder. Click on the “Documents” folder, then click the “Office Lens” folder. This is on the right pane of the window.
13. 13 Double-click your Word document. This opens the Word document you scanned using Office Lens in Microsoft Word.

Many people nowadays are getting used to scanning almost all of the documents that they receive for business or personal purposes. A good scanner is not only a must-have, it is also very useful. However, most office workers who use scanners day in and out most likely use the default scanning software that came with the scanner (such as HP Scan, Brother Software, etc.).

Edit and Convert Scanned PDF to Word on Mac Using PDFelement Pro

With the help of PDFelement Pro, you are able to directly edit scanned PDF document by adding, deleting texts, images, links, watermark, or easily annotate and mark up the file. Besides, you can convert the scanned PDF to any editable formats for further use.

2 Simple Steps to Convert Scanned PDF to Word on Mac(Including macOS 10.15 Catalina)

Now follow the guide below to learn how to convert scanned PDF file to Word document for further editing. The screenshots are taken from Mac version (10.15 Catalina compatible).

Step 1. Load your PDF to the Editor

First, you need to launch the program and then import the scanned PDF. To do this, you can either click the “Open File” button, or click the blank area on the interface and then drag and drop the file.

Step 2. Convert Scanned PDF to Word with OCR

Then you can OCR the PDF file by clicking the “Edit” > “OCR” button. In the pop-up window, choose Word as the output format and turn on the “OCR” feature. Finally click “Convert” to start the scanned PDF to Word conversion.

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PDFelement Pro for Mac – The Best Tool to Convert Scanned PDFs

PDFelement Pro comes with advanced OCR feature which enables you to edit and convert scanned PDF files with ease. You can also use this PDF tool to annotate PDF files, to secure PDF files with passwords, to fill out and create PDF forms and so on. This PDF editor will be the best assistant for you to manage your PDF documents, you can download this PDF tool for free and explore more features you needed.

Key Features of PDFelement Pro:

• Edit scanned PDF with built-in editing tools.
• Convert scanned PDF to Word, Excel, PPT, HTML, etc.
• Add password, watermark, or personalized signature to PDF.
• Create PDF from existing PDF, images, Webpages, and others.
• Annotate or mark up PDF with text box or customized markup tools.
• Come with outstanding OCR technology and support multiple languages.

Convert Scanned PDF to Word Using iSkysoft PDF Converter

In order to lighten the heavy burden of the work, a PDF Converter should be used to convert the scanned PDF files to editable Word files. There is an effective one called PDF Converter Pro for Mac which comes readily to mind. The in-built OCR technology makes it easy to extract content from the scanned PDF files and be stored in Microsoft Word. Once the scanned PDF to Word conversion is done, its content can be edited, copied and pasted on Microsoft Word processor. The copy paste jobs can be much easier in MS Word.

Steps to Convert Scanned PDF Files to Word on Mac

Step 1. Launch the PDF Converter Pro and Add Scanned PDF Files

After you download the program, launch it on your computer, then drag and drop the scanned PDF documents to add to the program. Interface is displaying as below. Alternatively, you can go to the File menu and click “Add PDF Files” to import your image-based PDF file.

Step 2. Choose .docx Format as Output Format

Click on the PDF file to highlight it and you will see a “Gear” icon beside the file. Just click the icon to open the output setting window. Here you need to select “Word” document as output file format, and then click “OK”.

Step 3. Start to Convert scanned PDF to Word

After all is set, click Convert button to start converting scanned PDFs to Word files now. Then you can enjoy all the files whatever you need.

More Tips about Scanned PDF

Unlike native PDFs, scanned PDFs are proving to be very popular especially when it comes to digitizing hard copy documents that were creating long before computers were popular. Scanned PDFs are basically image files which are stored in a PDF format. Using a simple scanner, one can easily turn any hard copy document or picture into a scanned PDF. With such simplicity, a hard copy document is saved from the effects of being exposed to elements of weather. Other than that, the other advantages that come with scanned PDFs is that they are self-contained, they are compact and save on a lot of space. Scanned PDFs can also be secured using passwords.

Scanned PDFs are very easy to scan. All one has to do is to get a good scanner and scan any document that they would want to scan. After scanning the PDF select the format that you want to save the image, which in this case is PDF. Regardless of scanned PDF being popular, there are a number of actions that one cannot perform on scanned PDF. The following are actions that cannot be performed on a scanned PDF:

· Selext text: Only a section of the image can be select but individual text or characters cannot be selected.

· Zoom in: When a scanned PDF is scanned, its text becomes blurred, something that so unlike native PDFs which easily zoom without blurring its text.

· Use document properties: Since scanned PDFs are basically images, document properties such as text size and text type are not available.

Conclusions

Did you know that you can use a scanner to convert paper documents into a fully searchable, editable document? It’s true! Instead of stuffing unorganized paper documents into a filing cabinet and forgetting about them, they can be scanned, digitally organized, and even edited with changes saved in the file.

Convert scanned document into word  You all know that scanning a paper document and then editing it as a Word document is moderately easy, but the resulting document will have a lot of artifacts. Using Image Converter Pro, you can convert scanned document into word quickly and easily without additional editing, which will help you improve both output quality and efficiency.