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.

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

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).

More for office use than anything else, some stuff i scan is folded over and I also scan books.
Nice that it is supported., but then if they still sell it then it should be supported.

They don't still sell the model I have and they definitely don't sell the 2009 model that they still support.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

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

No, it is not just taking a photo, or at least it doesn't need to be.

The iPhone Notes app for example has a dedicated document scanning feature. It automatically identifies the edges of the page, crops to the page, knows when you've put a new page down for it and OCRs the whole thing instantly. The whole process is just about as quick as using my document scanner, if not quite so convenient.

And for most purposes the output is just the same quality.

You might be surprised just how well it can work with just a phone.

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

They don't still sell the model I have and they definitely don't sell the 2009 model that they still support.

But I expect they are work the same and have the same electronics.
But it is good that they do support them still. Hp supported the one have got for a while, and to be fair it still works fine on Windows 10 and 11.
It no doubt will work fine on the Intel based Macs.

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

No, it is not just taking a photo, or at least it doesn't need to be.

The iPhone Notes app for example has a dedicated document scanning feature. It automatically identifies the edges of the page, crops to the page, knows when you've put a new page down for it and OCRs the whole thing instantly. The whole process is just about as quick as using my document scanner, if not quite so convenient.

And for most purposes the output is just the same quality.

You might be surprised just how well it can work with just a phone.

It is still only taking a photo, that is all a phone can do. I wonder why they have not built a scanner with a camera in? I suppose because the camera would have to be a bit of a distance away from the item being scanned.

I have taken photos with my phone of things close up and converted to PDF, it works ok and that is with a cheap phone, normally stuff from work. there are a few document scanning apps for Android, I have not used them for a few years as I never got on with them, but then the phone I had then did not have a great camera.

For windows I found this link for OCR software, one note have OCR in by all accounts.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-5-free-ocr-softwar...

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

It is still only taking a photo, that is all a phone can do.

I'm not sure that what a phone does is significantly different from what a scanner does. The scanner has the optical element which does a data collection process (just as a phone does a data collection process when it takes a photo) then it uses software to convert that data into a format required by the user (just as a phone with OCR capability like the iPhone with the Notes app converts that data into a format required by the user).

Edited by GonePostal (Wed 19-Apr-23 13:22:32)

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

It is still only taking a photo, that is all a phone can do. I wonder why they have not built a scanner with a camera in? I suppose because the camera would have to be a bit of a distance away from the item being scanned.

Several companies have made scanners that "only take a photo" with a camera, it is the a good way to scan books for example (because you don't need to lift the book off the scanner to scan each page as you would with a flat bed).

Fujitsu make one:

https://www.scansnapit.com/uk/products/scansnap-sv600

As do other people:

https://www.thescannershop.com/book-scanners/

Most of them are doing the same as a good scanning app can do on a phone:

- analysing the image to work out where the page is and cropping it
- adjusting contrast etc
- in some cases they detect the curvature of the book pages and correct the image to flatten the pages

This last feature is something the iPhone Notes app doesn't currently do with its scanning feature. Though it would be easy to do with the processing power in modern phones and I've not doubt there are phone scanner apps out there that do it.

Some of the overhead scanners don't just rely on simple image recognition to detect the curvature of the pages, they project a laser line onto the page and observe that to work out the correction. Though theoretically the iPhone could also do this, with its IR depth sensor.

<wanders off to see if there are any fancy book scanning iPhone apps out there>

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

<wanders off to see if there are any fancy book scanning iPhone apps out there>

As I suspected, there are loads. Just gave a couple of them a play and managed to scan multiple book pages easy, with auto curvature removal, shadow removal and OCR.

The modern smartphone really is a marvel, though I'll be sticking with my ScanSnap for now for convenience.

Life is full of surprises and today's for me has been how good my iPhone is at OCR. It makes me wonder what else it can do that I'm totally unaware of

In reply to a post by GonePostal:

I'm not sure that what a phone does is significantly different from what a scanner does. The scanner has the optical element which does a data collection process (just as a phone does a data collection process when it takes a photo) then it uses software to convert that data into a format required by the user (just as a phone with OCR capability like the iPhone with the Notes app converts that data into a format required by the user).

A scanner scans, which is why it is called a scanner, but I get your point.,

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

Several companies have made scanners that "only take a photo" with a camera, it is the a good way to scan books for example (because you don't need to lift the book off the scanner to scan each page as you would with a flat bed).

Fujitsu make one:

https://www.scansnapit.com/uk/products/scansnap-sv600

As do other people:

https://www.thescannershop.com/book-scanners/

Most of them are doing the same as a good scanning app can do on a phone:

- analysing the image to work out where the page is and cropping it
- adjusting contrast etc
- in some cases they detect the curvature of the book pages and correct the image to flatten the pages

This last feature is something the iPhone Notes app doesn't currently do with its scanning feature. Though it would be easy to do with the processing power in modern phones and I've not doubt there are phone scanner apps out there that do it.

Some of the overhead scanners don't just rely on simple image recognition to detect the curvature of the pages, they project a laser line onto the page and observe that to work out the correction. Though theoretically the iPhone could also do this, with its IR depth sensor.

<wanders off to see if there are any fancy book scanning iPhone apps out there>

Ahha, looking at the photos of them is what I thought they would look like.

I think I will stick with my Hp scanner until it goes belly up.
Just wish the Vuescan software was a bit better, but it does the job.

In reply to a post by longedge:

Life is full of surprises and today's for me has been how good my iPhone is at OCR. It makes me wonder what else it can do that I'm totally unaware of

i was playing with an Iphone yesterday, well two of them, both Iphones SE, nice and compact. Someone wanted me to put all their stuff from one to the other, but since we were in a pub it was not easy as they kept wanting to connect to the Wi-fi and Wi-fi in pubs are not great. I kind of done it. considering that I have never really used a iPhone much, I think I did well, but I think I will stick with my Android phone.

Anyway, yes, it is amazing what a smartphone can do these days.

A scanner takes a picture in a different way. It is the additional software that does the OCR.

In reply to a post by broadband66:

A scanner takes a picture in a different way. It is the additional software that does the OCR.

Yeah, I get what you mean, but if it doesn't scan then it is not really a scanner, just a camera, but I know I am splitting hairs