Free OCR to Word

Pros

• Beautiful ribbon interface and very simple to use
• Completely free software and reads in OCR files flawlessly

Cons

• Tool is fairly useless for practical purposes
• Reads in much of the OCR text incorrectly

Free OCR to Word is a utility whose purpose is to take in an OCR file and output the contents as text into a Word document.

When I first opened the OCR to Word utility, I was surprised by the interface. It has a beautiful ribbon-based theme that looks almost like the actual Microsoft product line. Unfortunately, this is where the positive features of this application work. It was likely made before recent advances were made in text recognition.

The program allows a user to select an OCR file, and then select a region of text to read and convert to text. Oddly, it seems to be fairly good at detecting the font type and size used and can convert that well. However, we could not get it to accurately read text in. It gets some words, but the output generally comes out garbled. Even when we read in very clear OCR files, we still got jumbled Word documents. They are not corrupted files, but the text from the OCR files is simply interpreted incorrectly.

This tool has a lot of potential, especially if its developers took advantage of the free libraries that support reading OCR files. I suspect that a future update of this program could completely turn this review around. Unfortunately, I can't recommend that anyone uses this software in its current version until it's fixed. It may be useful if you have a huge OCR file and need to get at least some of the text put into a Word document automatically, but be prepared to spend time editing it!

Pros

• Beautiful ribbon interface and very simple to use
• Completely free software and reads in OCR files flawlessly

Cons

• Tool is fairly useless for practical purposes
• Reads in much of the OCR text incorrectly