How to Convert an Image of Text into an Editable Google Doc

Google continues to blur the line between physical and digital. What used to only live on ink and paper can be edited right in your Drive. The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) feature in Google Drive can convert a pictures of a physical page of text into an editable Google Doc.


To watch the updated video and read the full article on the BetterCloud Monitor, visit: https://www.bettercloud.com/monitor/t...

---

Closed Caption:

welcome back to the Guru today I'm going
to show you how to turn an image of text
into an editable google doc this can be
very useful for if you find a recipe in
a cookbook and want to take a picture of
it and make changes to it Google Docs or
maybe you're a teacher and you get an
assignment from a student that on a type
of piece of paper that's printed out and
you want to view it in google docs and
have it saved the cloud it's actually a
really easy process because Google has a
technology called OCR which stands for
optical character recognition which
means it can tell which letters are
which on an image and it can tell which
font therein and so forth and then
convert those into a google doc I'll
show you how now so the first image
we're going to try is a thesis paper on
the Harry Potter movies so we'll drag
this into google drive then you can see
when we open it up
this is a JPEG image it's not a google
doc there's no way we can make changes
to it but if we go up to these three
dots in the top right corner and go down
to open with and then google docs takes
a little bit longer access to recognize
each character and go through the
document so during its image recognition
technology but once it is finished it
will put the image at the top as you can
see this is an image as I select it can
actually select the text in it when you
scroll down it will have transcribed all
the text within the image which is a
very cool tool this works very well with
pictures of books and any sort of it
image of type text but it also works
with handwritten text which I'll show
you now doesn't quite work as well but
it's pretty impressive still so i'm
going to import a handwritten note that
I wrote myself and let's take a look at
that now as you can see I don't have the
best handwriting but let's see how
Google can turn this into text so the
same thing with up to the three dots go
to open with Google Docs
all right not bad it missed a couple of
the words but still pretty impressive
considering the chicken scratch
handwriting that i have but i would
recommend sticking to type text when
using this tool or else you may get
something that looks somewhat like this
but i hope you have found this to be
useful and there are definitely a lot of
use cases for this tool so you have any
questions or comments please leave them
in the comments section below
thank you and have a great day