Lack of Office Tools OCR in Office 2013 on Win10 pc

I have recently put Windows 10 on my pc. working well other than the loss of my OKI printer due to total lack of drivers. (I have a work around using a USB stick and a WinXP notebook...)

At the same time as upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10, I also installed Office 2013.

What I am missing is that previously I used Office 2007 which had within Office Tools, a reasonable OCR program which would, with a scanner, convert documents to Word files.

Can I just install that tool onto my pc - I have the Office 2007 disc and the Original Key or is there a better ocr available. I have the Office Disc and key.?

Cheers!

Does this help?

I didn't know that OneNote has OCR functionality. Not something I have much need for but handy to know.

In reply to a post by Oliver341:

I didn't know that OneNote has OCR functionality. Not something I have much need for but handy to know.

In this link it says One note has OCR

There are online ones but some people may notwant to use them.
OCR seem to be something that have died out over the years.
I need to look for one for the MAc

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I need to look for one for the MAc

I know you are keen to eke out more life from your existing scanner, but...

In my experience the best solution to this on the Mac is to buy a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner, which comes with good software for scanning documents, OCRing them, outputting them into searchable PDFs and sending them to the output of your choice.

I've been using my ScanSnap ix500 for just over ten years now, sending every bit of paperwork that comes into the house into Evernote. The scanner and its software make this almost instant and painless.

Unfortunately they aren't cheap (it seems refurbished versions of the one I have sell for the same price I paid new in 2013) , but they do work very well.

ScanSnap used to use ABBYY's OCR as part of its scanning process, though it now uses its own built in OCR tool (quite possibly licensed from ABBYY still).

https://pdf.abbyy.com/finereader-pdf-for-mac/ (I've not used this myself)

There are other options including one from Adobe and also PDF Pen https://pdfpen.com/pdfpen/

Lots of people rave about PDF Pen and I tried it at one point, but didn't get on with it (though I was trying to use it for PDF form filling and not OCR).

There are a few free and "free" options, again I've not tried any of these myself, very happy with ScanSnap.

https://machow2.com/free-ocr-software-mac/

The scansnap is just a document scanner by the looks of it. My HP scanner came with Abbey fine reader, I don't know if the mac version is on the disk and even if it is, I doubt it will work on this mac
I never got it to work properly on my PC to be honest, not that I use OCR that often, I normally scan stuff to a PDF and then store them on a USB stick and also the NAS.

I have just paid for the software for my scanner, so I will be trying to keep my scanner going for a while longer. I noticed there are a few free ones, thanks for the info.

It seems strange OCR is not standard in office software

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

It seems strange OCR is not standard in office software

It seems unlikely that many people scan stuff nowadays. And it they do, probably with their phones, which do tend to have OCR built in now.

Microsoft Office (the PC version) did used to contain an OCR tool called Microsoft Office Document Imaging, but they removed it some years ago (probably because not many of their customers were still using it).

I also just discovered that bizarrely Word does have some hidden OCR tech:

- open new Word doc
- paste in image with text
- save as PDF
- open the PDF in Word
- Word offers to convert the images to text
- I got an editable document

This worked when I tried it on the Mac. But the stuff I saw online says it is unreliable and when I tried it on Windows it failed to actually convert the image to text.

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I need to look for one for the MAc

I know you are keen to eke out more life from your existing scanner, but...

In my experience the best solution to this on the Mac is to buy a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner, which comes with good software for scanning documents, OCRing them, outputting them into searchable PDFs and sending them to the output of your choice.

I've been using my ScanSnap ix500 for just over ten years now, sending every bit of paperwork that comes into the house into Evernote. The scanner and its software make this almost instant and painless.

Unfortunately they aren't cheap (it seems refurbished versions of the one I have sell for the same price I paid new in 2013) , but they do work very well.

ScanSnap used to use ABBYY's OCR as part of its scanning process, though it now uses its own built in OCR tool (quite possibly licensed from ABBYY still).

https://pdf.abbyy.com/finereader-pdf-for-mac/ (I've not used this myself)

There are other options including one from Adobe and also PDF Pen https://pdfpen.com/pdfpen/

Lots of people rave about PDF Pen and I tried it at one point, but didn't get on with it (though I was trying to use it for PDF form filling and not OCR).

There are a few free and "free" options, again I've not tried any of these myself, very happy with ScanSnap.

https://machow2.com/free-ocr-software-mac/

I've had a ScanSnap iX1600 sitting on the desk in my home office now for just over 2 years now. It replaced a much older ScanSnap S510M from circa 2009.

Brilliant little machines. Wouldn't be without them. All the bundled OCR and workflow software works a treat

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

The scansnap is just a document scanner by the looks of it. My HP scanner came with Abbey fine reader, I don't know if the mac version is on the disk and even if it is, I doubt it will work on this mac
I never got it to work properly on my PC to be honest, not that I use OCR that often, I normally scan stuff to a PDF and then store them on a USB stick and also the NAS.

Yes, it is just a document scanner. But it is a document scanner that comes with closely integrated software that is updated regularly, works well and still supports a scanner I bought over a decade ago (the earliest model they still support was released in 2009).

Well I agree that people don't scan as much as they used to, there is still sometimes a use for it, over the last few weeks I have had a letter to say about rent increase, my council tax demand and a few other things that I have scanned. I did nto use OCR for them, just stored in a PDF.


Scanning with a phone? that is not scanning that is just taking a picture and a lot of time it is hit-and-miss.