How to convert an image into editable text in Microsoft Word

If you receive a photo of data, don’t panic: you don’t have to enter it by hand. Microsoft Word can convert the image to text for you.

If you’re putting together a Microsoft Office document and receive textual content in the form of an image file, you might panic, especially if you’re eyeing a fast-approaching deadline. Entering all that data manually will cost you time and make the document prone to typos and other errors. The good news is that you don’t have to. Instead, you can Microsoft Word to convert the image to text. The results won’t be perfect, but it will be better than working from scratch.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to convert an image file to text that you can then use in Word or copy to Microsoft Excel or Microsoft PowerPoint. Word for the web lets you copy an image into a document and then download the file as a .pdf file, so you’ll still need the desktop version to complete the technique.

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I use Microsoft 365 on a Windows 10 64-bit system, but you can use earlier versions of Word.

How to copy an image to Word

You cannot open an image file in Word, but you can copy it to a Word document. Let’s assume you took a screenshot of a web page on TechRepublic.com and saved it to your local system. To copy that image to a Word document, do the following:

1. Use Explorer to find the image.
2. Select the image and press Ctrl + C to copy the image to the clipboard. If the image is available online, in an email or PowerPoint presentation file, right-click it and choose Copy Image.
3. Open a blank Word document and press Ctrl + V to copy the image to the document (Image A). When the image is selected, you can clearly see that it is an image and not text.

Image A

If you are working with an older version of Word and you can determine the image format, save the image as a PNG file. Doing so eliminates many conversion issues in older versions of Word.

Once the image is in Word, you are ready to convert it to text.

Convert an image in Word

There is no conversion feature or option in Word, but that is not a problem. By saving the .docx file as a .pdf file and then opening the .pdf file in Word, Word converts the image to text. To begin, save the Word file containing the copied image by clicking the File tab, choosing Save As or Save Copy (OneDrive), and then do the following:

1. Enter a name for the file, ImageWordSaveAsPDF.
2. Choose PDF (*.pdf) from the Save drop-down list (Figure B).
3. Click Save.

Figure B

By default, your Adobe viewing app should open the new .pdf file. The content is still an image. Save the .pdf file by clicking the File menu and choosing Save As, as shown in Figure C. You can change the name or not, but pay attention to the location of the saved .pdf.

Figure C

Return to Word. Click the File tab and choose Open. Locate the .pdf file, as shown in Figure Dand click Open. When Word asks you to convert the file to text as shown in Digits EClick OK.

Figure D

Digits E

Figure F

As you can see in Figure F, the converted image is now editable text. As I said before, the results will not always be perfect. You may lose the formatting and the file may contain text that you do not want to keep.

In the sample file, you may want to do the following:

• Straighten the right margin a bit by removing unnecessary carriage returns.
• Apply the Normal style or another style so that everything is the same.
• Run the Editor just in case: Interestingly, the conversion turned the y in the word “you” into a v.
• Delete the marketing text at the bottom.

I think most would agree that modifying the converted text is much easier than entering it manually from the keyboard. Once the text is in shape, you can save it as a Word document or copy the text to an Excel sheet or PowerPoint slide.