how do I copy into word

[Guest]

Hi, having trouble copying a document into word. all I get is gibberish

 

[Ted Zieglar]

What type of document are you trying to copy?

 

[Guest]

hi, it was a newspaper clipping I had scanned in, It went through fax
viewer,I also copied it to my desktop. but from there nothing.

 

[Ted Zieglar]

Did you use optical character recognition software during the scan?
Otherwise, the document was scanned as an image.

 

[Ken Blake]

In

hi, it was a newspaper clipping I had scanned in, It went
through fax
viewer,I also copied it to my desktop. but from there nothing.

When you scan a document, what you end up with is a *picture* of
the words (a graphic image), not the words themselves. If you
just tried to open that picture in Word, it's not surprising that
what you got is gibberish.

What you need to do to translate that picture into editable text
is run that picture through a type of software called "Optical
Character Recognition" ("OCR," for short). Scanners often come
with starter versions of such software, but if you don't have
such a product, you can buy any of the several products on the
market. I use one called OmniPage Pro.

Be aware that no OCR program is perfect. If you work from a clean
document on good paper (which a newspaper clipping is *not*) you
can get a high degree of accuracy, but you still need to
proofread carefully to correct any OCR errors.