OneNote is a treasure chest of tools that never stops giving. One of the options that can be a lifesaver is the ability to extract text out of an image so that you can use the words without retyping them from scratch. It’s a free Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool!
For an example, let’s take this image I copy and pasted into a OneNote page:
This picture has some text I’d love to be able to put into a Word document, but I really don’t have the time to re-type it from scratch. To let OneNote extract the text for me, I can right-click on the image and select Copy Text from Picture:
Once I do that, OneNote uses its OCR ability to copy the actual text to your clipboard. At that point, you can paste it anywhere you’d like:
Something to keep in mind… OCR technology does a very good job in figuring out letters and words in an image, but it is not perfect. Once you paste the text into a document, you do need to read it and make any necessary corrections. For instance, it somehow thought I had a space in the middle of the word “originally.” I’d hate to send that out uncorrected…
One Minute Office Magic 