Every once in a while I come across a printed document that I would really like to scan into my computer for further use, saving, or editing. Well if you have Microsoft Office and the included Microsoft Office Document Imaging Tool you already have this capability.

MODI has built-in functionality to take a tif image, perform OCR on it, then output the results in to Microsoft Word for further editing.

Here are the steps to OCR a tif image:

1. Take a document, business receipt, packing list, fast food menu, or anything else that has type on it and scan it using your favorite scanning device. As a side note, a lot of graphics programs can take other file formats and convert them to tif images.
2. Save this scan in a known location as a tif file type.
3. Go to Programs -> Microsoft Office -> Microsoft Office Tools -> Microsoft Office Imaging Tool and open it up.
4. Once MODI is open, go to File -> Open -> and browse to the location where you saved your tif image.
5. Now that your tif image is open, go back up to Tools -> and select Recognize Text using OCR.
6. An option box will pop up asking you, if you have a multi page tif document, to scan just one page or the entire document.
7. Once that is complete, go back up to Tools and select Send Text to Word. This will open up Microsoft Word with a new document wit hthe recently OCR scanned results of your tif image.
8. From here you can save the text and/or do any editing that you see fit.  One word of warning: Since OCR is only looking at text, it will loose essentially all formatting. So tabs and columns will not appear on the result as they were in the original scanned tif image.