▶ Found this video helpful? Subscribe | Buy me a coffee https://ko-fi.com/journeybytes
▶ About this video: This video will show you how to perform OCR (convert image to text) using Microsoft Office. MS Office can do OCR in two ways: using OneNote’s Copy Text from Picture feature or using Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI).

MODI can be installed from a licensed copy of MS Office 2007. If you don’t have the Office 2007 package, you can install it from SharePoint Designer 2007 which is provided by Microsoft as free download.

Get it by going to this link (try second link if the first one is dead):
• http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=21581
• https://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/Other-Office-Tools/Office-SharePoint-Designer.shtml

A more detailed tutorial can be found in my blog here: https://www.journeybytes.com/ocr-with-any-version-of-ms-office/

SUMMARY

MODI was last featured in MS Office 2007 and is no longer available in newer versions of Office. However, it can be installed separately and work with any newer office.

Installation of MODI from SharePoint Designer 2007 is similar to that of MS Office 2007.

During installation, choose the /”Customize/” option and set all installable packages to /”Not Available/” so as not to interfere with the MS Office packages you’ve already installed. Then expand Office Tools and set Microsoft Office Document Imaging to Run all from my Computer and Install.

Doing that will install MODI only.

Launch MODI and load a picture to OCR. The picture must be in TIF format (*.tiff, *.tif). If it’s in another format (JPEG, PNG, GIF etc.) open the picture with MS Paint then Save as TIFF.

You can use other image editors or standalone image converters to do this. Do the OCR and use the send text to Word button to transfer the recognized text to whichever version of Word you’ve installed (2007, 2010, 2013 or 2016).

Alternatively, you can scan and OCR documents directly from your scanner using Microsoft Office Document Scanning. Launch the program and connect it to your scanner.

When you scan the document using the utility it will automatically OCR the scanned images and send the recognized text to your version of Word you’ve installed. If your scanned documents have pictures or diagrams (charts, tables), make sure to leave the option /”Maintain pictures in output/”.

The exported Word document will be in HTML (*.htm). Inside the output folder, check the HTML folder for the exported images.

NOTE:

• By default, MODI uses the language that your installed MS Office is using. If you want to OCR a document with a different language, Open MODI then go to Tools – OCR – OCR Language and select among the three available options: English, French or Spanish

• OneNote and MODI are embedded with support for English, French and Spanish OCR languages. If you want to OCR text that’s in a different language, particularly those that are in a different alphabet such as Greek, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Cyrillic (Slavic languages – Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Ukrainian) etc. you’ll have to install the corresponding Language Pack first.

I’ve covered on how to do some of this in the blog post linked at the beginning of this description.

I hope the above information explains some of the concepts that are not included in the video. But if you’ve any more questions, just leave me a comment here or go to the contact page in my blog and leave me a message.

Cheers, and thanks again for watching!

Please take the opportunity to connect and share this video with your friends and family if you find it useful.