Hi Lisa,

As Mark said, there is a way to import a scanned file into Microsoft Word, 
assuming you have the Office suite of products.

Under Programs, then Microsoft, then Microsoft Office Tools, you'll find 
Microsoft Office Document Scanning.

Open that up by pressing enter on it.

As soon as you do, and I don't think they've changed the layout much from 
2003, you'll land on a combo box.  Choose the type of scan you want to do, 
black and white, black and white from colour, colour or greyscale.

I believe, but don't quote me on this, that if it's the first time you open 
up the program, it may bring up a dialog box asking you to choose the 
scanner you wish to use.  It should land you on a combo box, make sure you 
choose the TWAIN scanner driver.  It may have TW as the initials, or the 
full word TWAIN.  This is the one you want to choose, no matter how inclined 
you are to choose your scanner model.

In any case, once you choose the scanner, tab to the ok button and press 
enter.

You can go through this dialog box and go into the preset options by 
pressing spacebar on that button and selecting how you want the scanner to 
scan, as there are different settings you can set as default, and you can 
select the DPI setting, or dots per inch.

If your document has multiple pages to it, you may want to tab down to the 
checkbox that says prompt for multiple pages and make sure that's checked, 
in which case, once the page is scanned, a dialog box will pop up asking you 
what you want to do, at which point, you can select done or continue.  I 
believe the default button is continue.

Another checkbox you want to make sure is checked, is the one that says view 
file after scanning.  Make sure this one is checked so you will have the 
window you need to import the file into Microsoft Word.

There is one more button you may want to press the spacebar on, that being 
the scanner button.  If you didn't get the dialog box asking you which 
scanner you wanted to use, you may want to activate this button in order to 
choose your scanner.

Keep in mind that on occasion, the first time you press the scan button, 
nothing may happen, or the program will say that it's scanning the document, 
but you don't hear any noise coming from your scanner.  Don't worry, this is 
normal, and may be a bug in the program, just press continue in the 
resulting dialog box that asks you if you've got another page to scan and it 
should start scanning again.  If it doesn't do that on the second attempt, , 
just close any dialog boxes that may pop up, or any windows that may pop up 
save for the scanning window, when you press the done button, go back into 
the scanner button to change the scanner driver, as there will often be 
several TWAIN drivers there, and choose another one.  Tab to the ok button 
once selected and press the scan button again.  At this point, you should 
hear the scanner buzz to life and scan the document.

Once the document is finished scanning, if you have any other pages to scan, 
remove the one page you just scanned, then insert the second page you want 
scanned, then press the spacebar on the continue button, and the scanner 
will scan the second page.  If you are done scanning all the pages in the 
document, tab to the done button, and the scanning process will be complete.

In some cases, the image window will pop behind the scanning dialog box, so 
you may have to do an alt+tab to get to the image window.  This window is 
title Microsoft Document Imaging, and although you may not see it, and Jaws 
may go silent on you, the menus will be accessible to you, as the window is 
simply showing you the scanned image in TIFF format.

Here is where things go hazy for me.  Grins.

In Office XP, the option to send the text to word or the image to word used 
to be in the file menu, and in Office 2003 the option is in the Tools menu, 
so you'll have to look for this option in one of those two menus by pressing 
alt+F to go to the file menu, or alt+T to go to the tools menu.

There are two options you can choose from.  The first option is to recognize 
text using OCR, in which case you can do this, and Microsoft has a pretty 
good OCR process, and follow the prompts in the dialog box.

You can also stream line this process, especially if you're not looking to 
OCR the document by entering on the send text to Word option in the tools 
menu.

A dialog box will pop up where you should land on a combo box where you 
specify what pages, if a multiple page document has been scanned, which 
pages should be sent to Word.

If you're not looking to perform the OCr, like I said above, you can tab to 
the checkbox that says maintain pictures in output and make sure that's 
checked.

Once done, go ahead and tab to the ok button and press the spacebar, at 
which point, a Word window will open up with an html view of the document 
you just scanned.

Keep in mind that these are instructions for scanning a document in Office 
2003, and not necessarily Office 2007.  It may well be worth noting that I 
don't believe the process or the program has changed much, if at all between 
the two versions, but take that with a grain of salt.

I should also point out that if you're looking for exact lettering of a 
document, than this would not be the program to use for the OCR, as the 
accuracy is not very good.  You could play around with the DPI settings, 
making them smaller or larger, I can't remember which, to see which one 
gives you the best results, but typically, if you're looking to get exact 
wording, you may want to use ABBYY Fine Reader, or Nuance's OmniPage for 
this.

If you have any other questions, feel free to ask and I'll try to help where 
I can.

Victor
Co-moderator
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