Q: I have a brand new HP C5280 scanner printer copier. How do I scan from a book for example and then cut and paste or edit the scan as if it were a word document?
A: Consider what needs to happen before you get text from a picture. The computer must recognize text characters that might appear in the picture of your book's page. OCR stands for "optical character recognition" and it is an OCR program that attempts this nontrivial task. When you scan text - it comes out as a picture just like any other, not as text. This means you need to use OCR mode - which passes the picture to the OCR program [provided with the scanner or a better one purchased separately] which tries to read text in your picture of the page and finally save the text in a format known by your word processing program. OCR is the key. Your scanner comes with OCR software - be sure it's installed and you're in business. If you need the word processing software - just download the best of the best for free from http://openoffice.org and your OCR product will be compatible. OOo handles more formats than Microsoft Office can - including every version that Word ever used. No more worrying about "what version do they have" - find out and you can send that version! Good luck!