So you just received a printed copy of a Word document, and you would like to edit it. That's all good, but unfortunately, you don't have the original hard copy of the document from which the print-out came. How on earth do you edit it? Is there some kind of scan editor you can, perhaps, use to scan the document and then edit it? It all seems like the kind of high-tech stuff that requires you to make some pretty expensive purchases as you put together the machines you need to edit a simple document. Obviously, that won't make any business sense. If only there were a simpler way to do it… But wait, there is!
Optical character recognition, or OCR, is a widespread technology that allows you to scan documents and turn them into editable soft copy documents that you can then easily edit. Plenty of software makers offer OCR, such as Adobe OCR. Microsoft is one of those software makers.
If you have a printed copy of a document and would like to be able to edit it, you can do it using Word. First, scan the copy, and then use Microsoft OneNote to turn it into an editable document and send it to Microsoft Word. Microsoft OneNote is a note-taking and planning software that comes as part of the Microsoft Office suite. It has the ability to perform OCR on a wide range of documents, including PDF OCR.