Have you ever needed to copy text from an image, scanned document, screenshot, or PDF but ended up manually typing everything line by line? It can be incredibly time-consuming, especially when dealing with long paragraphs, receipts, notes, or printed documents.
Thankfully, there are simple tools that can automatically extract text from images in just a few seconds using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. Whether you're working on school assignments, office tasks, blog content, research, or personal projects, these tools can save a huge amount of time and effort.
In this guide, I’ll share two easy methods I personally use to copy text from images: Microsoft OneNote for offline extraction and a free online OCR service for converting images and PDFs into editable text files. Both methods are beginner-friendly and only take a few steps to use.
Using Microsoft OneNote
You don’t need the internet to extract or copy text from the picture on this method.
- Open Microsoft One Note.
- Click Insert tab, insert the Picture that contains the text you want to Extract or Copy. You can also copy picture and paste directly into the new Notebook.
- Right Click on the Picture and choose Copy Text from the Picture.
Using Free Online OCR Services
Free Online OCR Service
You can extract text from PDF and images (JPG, BMP, TIFF, GIF) and convert into editable Word, Excel and Text output formats. You need an internet connection to do this.
- 1. Upload file (max file size to upload is 15 MB)
- 2. Select language (choose from 46 languages) and output format (choose from docx, xlxs, txt)
- 3. Convert
- 4. Copy or save the extracted text from the image
These tools have saved me a lot of time when working with screenshots, scanned files, and image-based documents. Instead of manually typing everything out, you can quickly extract the text and continue working more efficiently.
If you know any other useful OCR tools or methods that work well for extracting text from images, feel free to share them in the comments below!
