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#1
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can I scan a form and use Word to fill in the blanks?
Someone in my office states she created a form in Word from a scanned
document. It looks exactly like the printed form we've been using. We now use it to tab through the fields and fill in the required info before we print it for our fax to send. it does not have the appearance of a PICT/ bitmap scanned or whatever document, it appears like a document created in Word. Is it really possible to scan in a document, have Word recognize the typefont, borders, and formatting, and essentially duplicate the document in Word format so that will allow insertion of blank fields that can be "tabbed" to and filled in for printing? |
#2
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Hal 9000 wrote:
Someone in my office states she created a form in Word from a scanned document. It looks exactly like the printed form we've been using. We now use it to tab through the fields and fill in the required info before we print it for our fax to send. it does not have the appearance of a PICT/ bitmap scanned or whatever document, it appears like a document created in Word. Is it really possible to scan in a document, have Word recognize the typefont, borders, and formatting, and essentially duplicate the document in Word format so that will allow insertion of blank fields that can be "tabbed" to and filled in for printing? The OmniForm program from Scansoft (http://www.scansoft.com/omniform/standard/) can do that. If you have a lot of forms to scan into Word, it's certainly worth the $100 price. If you have only an occasional form to convert, it's possible but a lot of work. You can scan the form as a picture, place that picture behind the text layer, and manually insert a form field from the Forms toolbar in the document to match each box on the picture. To fix the placement of the form fields, it helps to create a table with cells that match the lines in the form, and set the cells to "exact" (not automatically expanding) dimensions. When you're done, you "protect the document for forms" which turns on the form fields while preventing editing of the surrounding text. The tedium and difficulty of this task accounts for the price of OmniForm. :-) -- Regards, Jay Freedman Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org |
#3
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The version of OmniForm that I have does not do this, but uses a separate
program (separate from Word) for filling in the form. -- Charles Kenyon Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide See also the MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/ which is awesome! --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- This message is posted to a newsgroup. Please post replies and questions to the newsgroup so that others can learn from my ignorance and your wisdom. "Jay Freedman" wrote in message ... Hal 9000 wrote: Someone in my office states she created a form in Word from a scanned document. It looks exactly like the printed form we've been using. We now use it to tab through the fields and fill in the required info before we print it for our fax to send. it does not have the appearance of a PICT/ bitmap scanned or whatever document, it appears like a document created in Word. Is it really possible to scan in a document, have Word recognize the typefont, borders, and formatting, and essentially duplicate the document in Word format so that will allow insertion of blank fields that can be "tabbed" to and filled in for printing? The OmniForm program from Scansoft (http://www.scansoft.com/omniform/standard/) can do that. If you have a lot of forms to scan into Word, it's certainly worth the $100 price. If you have only an occasional form to convert, it's possible but a lot of work. You can scan the form as a picture, place that picture behind the text layer, and manually insert a form field from the Forms toolbar in the document to match each box on the picture. To fix the placement of the form fields, it helps to create a table with cells that match the lines in the form, and set the cells to "exact" (not automatically expanding) dimensions. When you're done, you "protect the document for forms" which turns on the form fields while preventing editing of the surrounding text. The tedium and difficulty of this task accounts for the price of OmniForm. :-) -- Regards, Jay Freedman Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org |
#4
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Use a scan of the original document as a background image and build the form
over it using tables containing form fields. -- Graham Mayor - Word MVP My web site www.gmayor.com Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org Hal 9000 wrote: Someone in my office states she created a form in Word from a scanned document. It looks exactly like the printed form we've been using. We now use it to tab through the fields and fill in the required info before we print it for our fax to send. it does not have the appearance of a PICT/ bitmap scanned or whatever document, it appears like a document created in Word. Is it really possible to scan in a document, have Word recognize the typefont, borders, and formatting, and essentially duplicate the document in Word format so that will allow insertion of blank fields that can be "tabbed" to and filled in for printing? |