Today’s time-saving tool is a little gem which you most likely won’t use every day, but when you need it, you’ll be looking up our blog just to kiss the screen in thanks!
If wasting time typing doesn't make you this happy, you need JOCR!
We all have things that we don’t use all the time, but come in extremely handy every so often. Things like the tire wrench, the stack of old books out in the garage, and the vacuum cleaner. You just don’t need them every month [yes, even in the case of the vacuum cleaner 
], but when your in-laws are headed over or you back over a set of tire spikes, they’re invaluable. Okay, maybe I do use the tire wrench every month…
It’s the same with this free Optical Character Recognition Tool that allows you to extract text from images without re-typing the whole thing. If you’ve ever been emailed a scan of a document by a non-tech savvy colleague or friend, that you needed to edit slightly and send back, you’ll be very, very excited right now. You’ll be avoiding one of the sneakiest work time-warps of all.
JOCR is a simple, no-fuss application for recognizing characters within an image. It uses screenshots, but you can also set it to capture an entire window – useful for the scan scenario. It’s a two-button operation, and the program itself is fairly fast.
However, be aware that you’ll need to manually proofread the recognized characters against the original image, especially if it is something like a scan from a magazine, where captions and breakout boxes will get jumbled up with the main text. You’ll end up with genius like: “To list, or not to list? 1. Use both hands on your computer, save time learning – for many of us are mousebound, using only our right hands …”. We did mention the program was simple!
You'll need to proof your JOCR text, sometimes it gets a bit mixed up...
JOCR then lets you know the number of characters that have been recognized, and stores them on the clipboard. Just go into Notepad or your word processing program and hit Ctrl+V or Edit-Paste, and voila!
You’ll need Microsoft Document Imaging for this specific program. It comes standard with Office 2003 or higher, and is usually in your ‘Microsoft Office Tools’ folder in the Program list. If this additional feature wasn’t installed on your computer originally, first go kick your computer-setter-upperer, then return and go to Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel to activate it.
Yes, this time saving tool can also be used for evil, as well as good – copying from copy-protected documents, etc – but we’ll leave that dilemma to your conscience.
Nice information. Really it saves more energy and timings…