Stupid Question about Scanning

[MTbowels]

I've received a letter that I need to photocopy to send on to someone else. Copying isn't the problem as I print and scan via a HP C4380 All in one unit.. What I'm not sure about is how to scan the letter so that it can be opened by the recipient - I want to send it as an attachment to an email. Both I and the recipient have MS Office 2007 on our computers. Would this be of any use?

I know this is a stupid question, but I just can't think tonight!

Thanks

[hc4361]

It will scan as jpeg,which can be opened on any pc.

[VHG]

You say you received a letter, was that via email or was it a printed letter that came in an envelope?

If it is a printed letter, then when you scan someting in it becomes an image (usually a JPEG).

You then send them the JPEG and they can view it with any image editor.

It wont be in Word format or any other format you can open with a Word Processor.

I believe some OCR (Optical Character Readers) can scan in words and put them in a word processor, but I have never used one.

[MTbowels]

Sorry. It was a printed letter that came in an envelope.

[tamborine]

scan the document and save as jpeg; (It's now a photograph of the document). Attach it to the recipient as you would a photo - and send.

The recipient will open it as a photographed document.

[Vagrant]

If you need to get it into a text format so that you can edit or modify it, then scan it, and use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software on the scanned image.
OCR is just software - not a hardware device as VHG suggests - it "looks" at the JPEG, works out what the letters are, and saves it as a text file (so that you can open it with Word, Notepad, etc).
There is plenty of free OCR software available - if you have a scanner, OCR software almost certainly came with it.
Note that it's not perfect - you need to read the output, and compare with the original - but it will do the vast majority of the work.

[VHG]

>not a hardware device as VHG suggests

I never said it was hardware. I know it is software

[hc4361]

Or upload it to GoogleDocs, and send it to the recipient. Click to share and you can both add to it.
http://www.google.com/google-d-s/tour1.html

[Vagrant]

Sorry VHG, I misunderstood what you wrote.

[magicmerlin]

If you want to convert to a Word document you should have OCR facilities within MS Office. If you want to know how just ask.

[MTbowels]

magicmerlin, I would be grateful if you could tell me how to use OCR facilities in Office 2007 as I can't find it myself.

In the meantime, thank you all for your answers so far.

[ChuckFickens]

the OCR support in office 2007 isn't installed as default.

goto add remove program (or just programs in vista) in the control panel, select office and then change options and install "MS Office Document Imaging and Scanning"

or if you have one note installed you can simply paste a scan into that and it will automatically convert the picture to proper text.

[magicmerlin]

I have Office 2003 and I can either go into

Microsoft Office -
Microsoft Office Tools -
Microsoft Office Document Scanning

If I have document in scanner

or

Microsoft Office -
Microsoft Office Tools -
Microsoft Office Document Imaging

If I have an image already scanned as a 'tiff' image.

I would expect 2007 to be similar if you have Microsoft Office Tools loaded.

If not this should help - http://www.geckoandfl...icrosoft-office-2007/