So I had a colleague receive a list of cities to import to a database in an excel spreadsheet. It turned out that someone had placed an image of the data in the spreadsheet instead of the text. This was looking to be a long day of typing when I happened upon the following awesome site: Online OCR . I was able to convert the image to text in MS Word, MS Excel or plain text.

All you have to do is take the image and use Paint or any image software, copy it from the document and save it as a png or jpeg. Then Save the file and you have the text ready to go. I did have a few mis-recognized letters, but changing a few keystrokes was better than the hour I would have wasted typing out all the cities.

And all this without registration. When I registered it gave a few more options for output such as PDF, different versions of Excel and Word, and RTF. Also multi page support, convert to black and white and creating zips.

There is also multi-language support and even an email service to send in the your docs and receive an email with the converted doc. There is a limit to the amount of pages you are allowed with the login service and you can purchase sets of pages in chunks if you use the service regularly.

Great Service and I was able to convert the list in just a few minutes.

Thanks Online OCR!