Microsoft Office 2003 includes an excellent, but little-known utility called Microsoft Document Imaging. This tool allows you to recognize text from TIF image files. Document Imaging actually does a much better job of recognizing text than some other OCR (optical character recognition) programs out there. I was pleasantly surprised with the results. Also included is Microsoft Document Scanning, which scans documents to TIF images. If you do a complete install of Office 2003, these tools are installed by default. If you didn't install them along with Office, you can find these two utilities and plenty more on your installation CD. Just select a Custom Install and review your options.
