Have you ever wished your paper documents were in a digital Word format? Often times folks find themselves with a paper document that needs editing and do not want to re-type it. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, and is the process of converting written or printed text into into a form that can be understood by a computer. Using OCR, your computer can take text from a scanned page and insert it into a text file, or word processing document. There are a number of OCR products on the market, but don’t go for your wallet just yet. If you own Microsoft Office, you already own software capable of Optical Character Recognition: Microsoft Office Document Imaging. You can use Microsoft Office Document Imaging to grab text from a scanned document and convert it into a usable Word document. WeScanFiles.com can help with your document conversion to Word format needs Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping system in an office, or to publish the text on a website. OCR makes it possible to edit the text, search for a word or phrase, store it more compactly, display or print a copy free of scanning artifacts, and apply techniques such as machine translation, text-to-speechand text mining to it. OCR is a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and computer vision. OCR systems require calibration to read a specific font; early versions needed to be programmed with images of each character, and worked on one font at a time. “Intelligent” systems with a high degree of recognition accuracy for most fonts are now common. Some systems are capable of reproducing formatted output that closely approximates the original scanned page including images, columns and other non-textual components.