Articles about OCR

We’re huge fans of PowerToys, and one of the greatest modules included in the utility collection is Text Extractor. As the name suggests, this provides a way to pull text out of images ready to edit and use in other documents. Microsoft has also added a similar tool to Microsoft Photos, and now the company has brought it to another area of Windows 11.

The increasingly useful and powerful Snipping Tool has been updated with a text extractor button in the app’s capture bar. This makes the process of copying text from your screen to the clipboard insanely quick and easy, eliminating the need to take a screenshot before extracting text.

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Microsoft Photos is something of an unsung hero of the Windows app family. It is an astonishingly useful and powerful tool that Microsoft keeps quietly updating on an irregular basis. The latest update has just landed, and it’s a biggie.

We’ve already seen the addition of OCR capabilities to Microsoft Photos so in-image text can be easily copied; this has now been extended to include the option to search the web with text that has been extracted. But this is far from being the only change in the latest update.

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Snipping Tool is one of the most useful apps to be found in Windows 11, making light work of grabbing on-screen content. Primarily concerned with taking screenshots, it has developed over the years to include a handy OCR component for extracting text.

And now this feature is in line for an upgrade. Microsoft is improving the text extraction capabilities of Snipping Tool so that text can be grabbed without the need to take a screenshot first.

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There is always a slight sense of disappointment when Microsoft says that the current release cycle for PowerToys is focused on stability and improvements, as it means there are not going to be any new utilities. This is where we find ourselves at the moment, but the pessimism may be misplaced as PowerToys v0.74.0 is packed with important changes and updates.

Key among them is a major update to the recently added OCR component Text Extractor. In the boost up to Text Extractor 2.0, there are important additions including a new overlay, table mode and more. But this is far from being the end of the story; PowerToys v0.74.0 includes improvements to just about every module.

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There are many reasons for wanting to grab text from an image files, and there are numerous tools that let you do just that. But if you're looking for a quick and easy way to convert an image into editable text, you might be surprised to find that Windows 10 offers a way to do it without the need for additional software.

More than just images, the operating system includes a great, secret way to grab any text you can see on your screen and convert it into an editable format. Here's what you need to know about optical character recognition (OCR) in Windows 10.

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