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For those who still use desktop scanners to scan their documents to a digital format, you might run into the problem where you cannot edit or copy the text from your scanned document. Most scanners will save your scans as PDF files which is fine, but if your scanner does not have an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) feature, then your document and its text will be scanned as an image similar to if you were to take a photograph of the document.
This might be fine for most cases but if you want to edit the text from your scanned PDF or copy and paste it into another document, you will not be able to do so. In this article, we will be showing you how to convert text in a scanned PDF file into editable text.
To accomplish this task, we will be using Microsoft’s free online cloud storage platform OneDrive. If you are a Microsoft Windows user, then you most likely have a Microsoft account that you can use to log into OneDrive with.
Once you log into your OneDrive account on the OneDrive website, you will need to click on the New & Upload button and choose Files upload.
Then you can browse to the location of the PDF file on your computer and select it to have it uploaded to your OneDrive account. Once the file is uploaded, simply select the file by clicking on the circle to the left of the file name. Next, click on the ellipsis (…) to the right of the file name and choose Preview.
You should then see a preview of your scanned PDF file and from there you can click on the Open button at the upper left corner of the page. You may also see a message that says the file doesn’t have a preview that can be shown but you should still be able to click the Open button.
Your scanned PDF should then be opened in the online version of Microsoft Word. Once it has been opened here, you can then highlight text and copy it so it can be pasted into other applications.
If you click on the button that says Open in Desktop, your scanned PDF file will then be converted to a Word document that you can then continue to edit.
Once the conversion is complete, you will have the choice to either view or edit the document. You will also be notified that no changes to your original PDF file will be made.
Once you have your converted PDF open in Word, you can then edit it from here or download it to your desktop by going to the File menu, select Create a copy and then Download a copy.
As you can see, it’s very easy to convert text in a scanned PDF file into editable text using Microsoft OneDrive.
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