I am trying to scan a document into my computer to make changes to it. It puts my doc. in Paint. Help!?

Q: I need to know once I have scanned my document, how do I get to where I can make changes to it? I saved it to MS Word, but all I get are funky images. Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong and how to fix it? I don't want to have to rekey this entire document for 1 change.

A: A scanner normally scans images, and produces image files - gif, jpg. bmp. These are pictures, and can be only edited like pictures (say, in Paint). What you need is to convert them to text documents and that's easier said than done - you need an OCR program - special software that can read what is written in the picture and create a text document (DOC, PDF, txt) from it. This one you can then edit and print normally, just don't be surprised if errors happen or formatting is lost - OCR is one of domains where computers are still far behind people in matter of efficiency and precision.

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