Converting .tif to .doc (word)

Factual Questions
1

Help, please dopers! Fight my ignorance! How do I do this?

Thanks

2

Since the TIF format is an image, there are two possibilities, depending on what you mean:

  1. If you mean to have the Word document include the picure, just drag and drop the image icon into Word and save (or open the TIF in an image editor, and copy/paste into Word). Presto, Word document with inline picture.

  2. If you mean that the TIF file contains text that you want to be able to edit in Word, you will need some kind of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software to change the image to text. AFAIK, this cannot be done within Word alone.
    D

3

You should be able to do this using OCR software, like ScanSoft PaperPort.

4

Thanks for the help. It was the second option btw.

5

Depending on how much text there is in your .tif graphic, you may find it quicker to just re-type everything into Word.

OCR software is notoriously inaccurate, and you’d spend more time fixing mistakes than if you just typed it by hand.

6

This is not anywhere near true unless the quality of your TIFF is horrible. I use Abbyy FineReader OCR software on a daily basis (as part of an automated document processing system I helped create) and its accuracy is very good. If the TIFF image is relatively noise free, you can expect near 100% accuracy. Your comment was true in the 80’s and maybe even the 90’s, but not anymore.