Scanning and saving documents?

Hi.

I'm using Win7 Ultimate, Office Pro 2007, and have an older (but perfectly functional) HP PSC1200 all-in-one.

I have some documents I want to scan and save as documents (preferably as .doc). Is there any streamlined way of doing this? Fax & Scan only gives options to save scans as a few different image formats - .gif, .jpg, .bmp, and .tif - no other image formats, nor any document formats (.pdf, .txt, .doc, etc.) are available.

As of now, after looking online in various places for over an hour, from what I can see, the necessary process is to save the scan as a .jpg, convert it to a .tif, open it with the Office Document Imaging program, and then send it to word.

Is this honestly how this is supposed to be done? I find it hard to believe that with 7 Ultimate and Office Pro that I'm going to have to buy third-party software to be able to scan documents and save them as documents.

Does anybody know of a more streamlined process?

ALT + I + P + S worked on my Epson 4490 scanner too. Don't hold down all the keys - Hold down the alt key and then press I, P and S in order

Now WHY doesn't Word 2010 have a way to do this simply?????

HammerHead said:

Read far enough down in this one.
scanning into word 2007

I was so pleased to find these instructions in the article provided by HammerHead! An easy way to scan docs right into Word 2007! See if this works for you.

Open Word. Click on the Office button. Select Word Options.
Select the 'Customize' option and click the button named 'Customize.'
In the Categories section, select 'All Commands' and in the Commands section find 'insertImageScan.' (You can add it to your QuickAccess Toolbar.)
Put your selection in the "Press new shortcut key:" area (The poster used Alt+Ctrl+Shift+I)
Assign
Close
OK
Now in Word, when you press your keyboard shortcut, you will get the "Insert Picture from Scanner or Camera" option.

NOTE: Sometimes the settings are not save to the Normal template when Word is closed.

HammerHead said:

How to insert scanned images in Office 2007 and Office 2003 Programs

The above tutorial from Microsoft shows you how to insert documents into Word, but does not create an EDITABLE Word doc. If you want your Word doc to be editable, you have to use an OCR app/program to do so. There are several that work pretty well:

OCR Scanning is available in most (but not all) versions of MS Office. About Microsoft Office Document Imaging - Support - Microsoft Office
Go to Start, All Programs, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Tools, and then click Microsoft Office Document Imaging. (Not available in all versions of MS Office)

How to Copy Text or Image to a Word doc:
Use text or pictures from an online fax or a scanned document

3rd Party OCR apps -

OmniPage - http://www.nuance.com/imaging/products/omnipage.asp is a good program for OCR scanning and editing. OCR ability is excellent, even with poor scans or damage originals. (Nuance also publishes PDF Converter Professional 6 which is their PDF to Word EDITOR! http://www.nuance.com/imaging/pdfconverter/pdfconverter-professional.asp) The user initiates the scan from within OmniPage, and after OCR is initially performed, the document is presented to the user in Edit mode. The user can then go through the document and compare the scanned text with the original and make changes where necessary. Like any word processor would, it also notes misspells and other problems upfront for user to fix.
There are 2 versions with differing capabilities, the Pro version and Standard. While the Standard version of OmniPage is about $150, the Pro version is $499 (and FREE with CANON PRINTERS)

OCRTerminalis a free online OCR service that converts scanned images into EDITABLE + searchable Word docs. Register a free account and you can convert 20 pages for free every month.

Free-OCR Text recognition software. Doesn’t recreate the document, but gives you the text, which is EDITABLE. There is a limit of 10 image uploads per hour. The max file size is 2 MB.

OnlineOCR– Text recognition software. Doesn’t recreate the document, but gives you the text, which is EDITABLE. Free and accurate, however, the max file size is 1 MB. Registration is required.