PC Magazine tips

Scanning Made Easy
ARTICLE DATE:  03.15.06

By Helen Bradley

Scanning and managing a multipage paper document can be an exercise in frustration. If scanning a 20-page document leaves you juggling 20 individual files, it’s time to get help. Microsoft Office Document Scanning, shipped with Office 2003, could be your next best friend.

The Document Scanning tool joined a document-imaging component that has been around in Office for many years. You’ll find both of the programs in the Microsoft Office | Microsoft Office Tools folder in your Start menu. The two programs are interlinked, and in combination they offer a one-stop shop for many typical and otherwise complex scanning tasks.

Document Scanning

Microsoft Office Document Scanning uses any installed scanner and includes a range of scanning presets. If none suit your needs, click the Preset button and choose Create New Preset to select scanner and file settings such as scan resolution, type of scan (monochrome, 8-bit gray, 24-bit color), whether to save the images as multipage TIF files or MDI files, and the level of compression used. You can also configure the scan page size, the save directory, and which automatic file-naming system to use.

Document Scanning uses OCR to recognize your scanned text, and it can automatically rotate and straighten a scan if the preset is configured to do so. If you want, you can choose to view the scanner’s own dialog before scanning—or by-pass it and let Document Scanning do the work.

Write On Your Scans

When you’re done scanning, all the pages in the file appear in the Microsoft Office Document Imaging tool. Choosing View | Thumbnails displays page thumbnails down the left side of the screen. To reorder pages, drag and drop them in the thumbnail area.

You can annotate your scans, which is useful for completing forms and working collaboratively. Tools for that, available from the Annotations toolbar, let you draw or write on the document. For larger pieces of text, drag the cursor to add a text box over the document and type text into it. The text box can have a colored background (with a variable transparency level). To add a picture over the top of a page, click the Insert Picture tool, or you can paste text or graphic objects from the Windows Clipboard by choosing Edit | Paste. Annotations are saved on a separate layer over the page and can be displayed or not by choosing Tools | Annotations and then Hide Annotations or Show Annotations.