OneNote Will Do OCR On Screen Captures

I just stumbled upon a handy feature in Microsoft OneNote 2010, namely the ability to harvest text from a screen capture. It’s not perfect OCR, probably as good as what your consumer scanner software does, but it is SO easy to use.

1. Open a new or existing OneNote notebook.

2. From the ribbon, select Insert>Screen Clipping.

3. The Clipping Tool will launch.

4. Grab the region that has the text you don’t feel like typing, when you release the mouse button the screen clipping will be inserted into your note as an image.

5. Right-click the image, select “Copy Text From Picture“.

6. The text will be copied to the clipboard.

7. Paste the results into OneNote or some other text editor.

8. Clean up the inevitable errors.

9. Say to yourself, “Well that might be useful sometime”.