How do I Initiate an OCR scan in Microsoft Office Word 2010?

From the MS TechNet site - Changes in Word 2010:

Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI) MODI provided a common document imaging and scanning solution for Office. It was also the basis of the Fax feature for Office. When MODI was installed, it was the default handler for .tif, .tiff, and .mdi files. In Office 2010, MODI is fully deprecated. This change also affects the setup tree, which no longer shows the MODI Help, OCR, or Indexing Service Filter nodes on the Tools menu. The Internet Fax feature in Office 2010 uses the Windows Fax printer driver to generate a fixed file format (TIF). MODI and all its components are deprecated for 64-bit Office 2010.

Alternatively, you could use OneNote 2010's Insert ribbon to import a Scanner Printout and then use the Copy Text from Picture option when right-clicking on a picture.


We ran into this when people started migrating to Office/Word 2007. If you see this MS article they explain that basically they took the functionality out and you should just scan things in with your scanner software and then drag it into Word.

In 2007 you could add the Import From Scanner functionality back via creating a macro. This has been confirmed to work in the 64bit Office 2010.

Create the following Macro (View > Macro > View Macros > Macros in Normal.dotm > Type 'scan' as the name > Create > Paste in code:

Sub InsertFromScanner()  
  On Error Resume Next 
  WordBasic.InsertImagerScan
End Sub 

You can then 'Customise the Quick Access Toolbar' > choose commands from: 'Macros' and ADD. Then Modify it to give it a distinctive icon.

This will give you the 'insert from scanner' box with one click from the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT).

They seem to want most OCR work done in OneNote these days, so I'm not exactly sure how much OCR is still available in Word (my clients just wanted to scan in images).