can I scan a form and use Word to fill in the blanks?

[Guest]

Someone in my office states she created a form in Word from a scanned
document. It looks exactly like the printed form we've been using. We now
use it to tab through the fields and fill in the required info before we
print it for our fax to send. it does not have the appearance of a PICT/
bitmap scanned or whatever document, it appears like a document created in
Word. Is it really possible to scan in a document, have Word recognize the
typefont, borders, and formatting, and essentially duplicate the document in
Word format so that will allow insertion of blank fields that can be "tabbed"
to and filled in for printing?

 

[Jay Freedman]

Someone in my office states she created a form in Word from a scanned
document. It looks exactly like the printed form we've been using.
We now use it to tab through the fields and fill in the required info
before we print it for our fax to send. it does not have the
appearance of a PICT/ bitmap scanned or whatever document, it appears
like a document created in Word. Is it really possible to scan in a
document, have Word recognize the typefont, borders, and formatting,
and essentially duplicate the document in Word format so that will
allow insertion of blank fields that can be "tabbed" to and filled in
for printing?

The OmniForm program from Scansoft
(http://www.scansoft.com/omniform/standard/) can do that. If you have a lot
of forms to scan into Word, it's certainly worth the $100 price.

If you have only an occasional form to convert, it's possible but a lot of
work. You can scan the form as a picture, place that picture behind the text
layer, and manually insert a form field from the Forms toolbar in the
document to match each box on the picture. To fix the placement of the form
fields, it helps to create a table with cells that match the lines in the
form, and set the cells to "exact" (not automatically expanding) dimensions.
When you're done, you "protect the document for forms" which turns on the
form fields while preventing editing of the surrounding text. The tedium and
difficulty of this task accounts for the price of OmniForm.

 

[Charles Kenyon]

The version of OmniForm that I have does not do this, but uses a separate
program (separate from Word) for filling in the form.

--
Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide


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[Graham Mayor]

Use a scan of the original document as a background image and build the form
over it using tables containing form fields.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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