How do I apply OCR in Microsoft Word?

Last reviewed: October 1, 2026 · Markdown version

There is no OCR command in Word. What Microsoft documents instead is opening a scanned PDF in Word: Word converts it into an editable document and attempts to import the text, and the result is only as good as the scan. Inserting a scan as a picture does something different. And the mobile app Microsoft's Word article still recommends for scanning has been retired.

Open the scanned PDF in Word

Microsoft's article on scanned documents gives this as the route when you have no scanning app: "scan your document as a PDF using your scanner's native software and then open that PDF file in Word." When you do, "Word opens a dialog box confirming that it is going to attempt to import the text of the PDF file. Click OK to confirm, and Word will import the text." It is frank about the limits: "The accuracy of the text recognition depends on the quality of the scan and on the clarity of the text you scanned. Handwritten text is seldom recognized, so scanning typed or printed text will give the best results. Always proofread the text after opening it in Word" (Insert scanned text or images into Word, read 1 October 2026). That article applies to desktop Word on Windows.

The steps are the ordinary ones for opening a PDF: in Word, browse to the file and click Open, then OK on the conversion message. Microsoft adds that the conversion "works best with documents that are mostly text" and that the result "might not have a perfect page-to-page correspondence with the original" (Scan and edit a document, read 1 October 2026). Your original PDF is left alone; Word works on a copy.

When Word gives you a picture instead of words

Microsoft's article on opening PDFs warns: "If the PDF contains mostly charts or other graphics, the whole page might show up as an image. When that happens, the text can’t be edited." It also explains why layouts drift: PDF "stores the location of text, pictures, and vector graphics on a page, but not necessarily the relationships among them," so Word "uses a system of complex rules" to guess at headings, lists and tables (Opening PDFs in Word, read 1 October 2026). That article never uses the word OCR, and it does not describe what happens to a page that is nothing but a scanned image. Its editing guide adds one blunt line about exactly that kind of file: "PDFs of book chapters or something that looks like a manuscript from a copier won't be formatted well in Word" (Edit a PDF, read 1 October 2026).

Insert, Pictures is not OCR

The same scanned-text article describes a second method: save the scan as a .JPG, .PNG or .GIF, then in Word use Insert, Pictures, This device. That places an image in your document. Microsoft's article does not say Word reads any text from a picture inserted this way, and we found nothing in it suggesting it does; plan on the words staying locked in the image (Insert scanned text or images into Word, read 1 October 2026). The article's final suggestion is the scanner itself: "your scanner may have come with an application that allows you to do Optical Character Recognition (OCR)".

The app Word's help still recommends is gone

That article calls the free Microsoft Lens phone app "The best way to scan a document into Microsoft Word". Microsoft's separate retirement notice says Lens "will be retired from iOS and Android devices starting January 9, 2026", that it was removed from both app stores on February 9, 2026, and that new scans stopped after March 9, 2026. The replacement it names is the OneDrive app's built-in scanner (plus button, then Scan photo), with a catch worth knowing: "OneDrive does not support saving scans locally on your device" (Retirement of Microsoft Lens, read 1 October 2026).

Other routes

If you only need the words out of one scan, a free OCR route may be quicker than Word: three of them compared. If you use Acrobat, OCR in Adobe Acrobat walks through its own route. And to check first whether your PDF needs OCR at all, try selecting a word.