In this article I will share how to copy text from an image to Ms Word. All operating systems come with Copy and Paste capabilities of written text and its capabilities are truly amazing. If you have text of 5000 or 10,000 words, all you have to do is highlight all and press Ctrl + C to copy and now you can paste that text wherever you like.
However, this little trick doesn’t work on Image, you can’t just highlight text on Image and copy it. There are situations where you need to copy text from an image, like you have a screenshot containing text that you need to extract. For this purpose, there is a special Optical Character Recognition (OCR) application that can extract text from these images.
Also read: 6 Best OCR Apps for Android
You can use this OCR app to extract text from images. In the past this software came with a paid version, but you can also get a free OCR software now. It’s possible that you have it by now, but you don’t know it.
The accuracy of this software is not 100% correct, but it is good enough, better than typing whole text again. Accuracy basically depends on how the text is written in the image, such as format, size, and other colors and designs, etc.
There are 2 ways that we can use to copy text from images to Microsoft Word. The first uses Microsoft OneNote and the second uses the free OCR Online site.
Method 1: Copy Text from Image Using Microsoft OneNote
Most of us already have Microsoft OneNote, but many don’t know that since 2007 Ms OneNote comes with OCR capability. You can simply upload the image in OneNote and extract the text from it.
If you don’t have Microsoft OneNote, you can download it directly from the Microsoft page (you must either have a Microsoft account or create a new account to use it).
1. To extract text from Image using Microsoft OneNote, open Microsoft OneNote and click “Insert” from the ribbon tab. There you will see options “Picture“.
2. Click on it and from the new window, select the image from which you want to extract the Text and click “Insert“.
3. When the image opens, right click on the image and from the side menu select “Copy Text From PictureThe text will be copied and now you can paste it in Ms Word or wherever you like.
4. As you can see in the screenshot below, Accuracy is not Perfect, there are some errors but you can still make these small changes manually.
Method 2: Copy Text from Image Using OCR Website
You can also use special OCR websites which will allow you to upload images and extract text for you. For this tutorial, we have chosen OCR Online, but there are also many other websites that you can try if you are not comfortable with this one.
In their Privacy Policy, they mention that they will never view the contents of a user’s uploaded file, however, we still would not recommend using the service for highly sensitive files.
1. First, go to the OCR website from here and click “Select File …” to upload an image.
2. Select the image and click “Open“.
3. You can also select the language of the text that you want to extract from the drop-down menu next to the option “Select File …”. Select the language to be English.
4. Once selected, now press “Convert“.
5. After a while, you will see all the extracted text in the window below. Now open Ms Word, then copy and paste. Finished
If you have more than one image, then you have to Register or create an account there to take advantage of the additional features which involve extracting text from more than one image and some other useful features.
Also read: How to Insert Video into Microsoft Word
That’s the tutorial on how to copy text from an image to MS Word. I hope this article helped you! Thank you for visiting and don’t forget if you find this article useful, please share it with your friends too.
