Image to Word

Each page becomes a heading followed by its text as ordinary paragraphs, and each detected grid becomes a real Word table with a bold header row. Page notes — an illegible patch, a page that turned out to be an image — appear in the margin colour so you can see where to look before you start editing.

What it is not is a facsimile. Fonts, columns, logos and positions are not reproduced, because OCR recovers content, not design. If your goal is a document that looks like the original, the right tool is a PDF editor or the document-translation tool, which edits text in place and leaves the layout alone.

If your goal is a document you can rewrite — a scanned policy you need to amend, a printed form you want to reissue, a page of handwriting you are turning into a report — this is the shorter route. You get typed content with the structure intact and you do the formatting once, in Word, where you were going to do it anyway.

The download costs 3 credits, once per job. Re-downloading the same job later is free, so a document you come back to next week costs nothing the second time.

Upload a picture of a page and the text appears below it, in the order a person would read it. That covers a photo of a book, a screenshot of an app that will not let you select text, a scanned contract, a whiteboard after a meeting, and a page of your own handwriting.

Each page comes back separately, with a confidence mark, so on a batch you can see which page needs a second look.

Nothing you upload becomes a public page. The file is deleted as soon as the job finishes, and the text stays attached to your job for you to copy or download.

Reliable: printed pages, receipts, forms, screenshots, slides, book pages photographed flat, and neat handwriting in the writer's usual hand.

Usually fine: cursive that a stranger could read, a whiteboard photographed square-on, a scan with a coffee ring on it, and mixed pages where a table sits in the middle of prose.

Genuinely hard, and it will say so rather than invent an answer: personal shorthand, faded thermal receipts, text at a steep angle, dense small-type columns, and anything photographed while moving.

Unreadable words come back as [illegible]. That marker is the point: a reader who cannot tell which words were guessed has to check every one.

Accuracy is decided before you upload anything, by how the picture was taken. Four things matter, in this order.

1. Fill the frame with the page. Text that is 40 pixels tall reads perfectly; text that is 8 pixels tall does not, whatever the megapixel count of the camera.
2. Shoot square-on. A page photographed from an angle has converging lines and uneven focus, and the far end of every line is the part that fails.
3. Find even light. One window beats one lamp; a shadow across the middle of a page costs you that band of text. Turn the flash off.
4. Hold still, or rest the phone on something. Motion blur cannot be recovered by any reader.

There is no step five. Resolution beyond about 2000 pixels on the long edge adds upload time and nothing else, which is why oversized images are scaled down here before they are read.

Switch "Read as" to tables and every grid on the page comes back as rows and columns instead of a run of words. That is the difference between retyping a supplier list and downloading it, and it is why the spreadsheet export exists: one sheet per table, with numbers stored as numbers so a column of prices adds up without being cleaned first. When the table is the whole point, Image to Excel is built for exactly that and adds a CSV download.

Screenshots are the easiest input there is, because the text was rendered rather than photographed. Error messages, chat threads, dashboards and anything inside an app that blocks copying all read cleanly.

PDFs are handled two ways. A PDF exported from Word, Pages or a website already contains its text, so it is pulled straight out of the file — no model involved, the result is exact rather than approximate, and those pages are free because nothing had to be recognised. A PDF that is really a scan is read page by page like any other image, and charged like one. You do not have to know which kind you have; the file is checked and the cheaper path is taken automatically.

Three pages a day, across up to three uploads, cost nothing. You see the text, the tables and the confidence marks, and you can copy all of it. There is no account and no email.

Upload more pages than your allowance covers and the pages inside it are read in full, the rest are listed as unread, and the result says exactly where it stopped. Nothing is charged. On a scanned PDF, only the pages you are entitled to are ever sent to be read, so a preview costs the same whether the file has four pages or four hundred.

Beyond that it is 1 credit for each page that has to be recognised. Credits are bought once, never expire, and work across every tool here: a 30-page scanned report costs 30 credits, roughly $1.30 from the middle pack. The Word and spreadsheet downloads cost 3 credits each, once per job — re-downloading the same file later is free.

A PDF that already carries its own text is the exception. Extracting it costs nothing on our side, so it costs nothing on yours: up to 40 pages a job, free, without touching your daily allowance.

Read the numbers first. Text errors are obvious on sight; a transposed digit in a total or a date is not, and those are exactly the values people copy without looking. Then check proper nouns, which have no context to be corrected from, and anything you intend to quote.

That is a minute of work per page — the same minute a data-entry service builds into its price. What you are buying here is the retyping, not the checking.