What is OCR?
A plain-English definition, and the tools that work with it.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is technology that reads the text inside an image or scanned document and turns it into real, selectable, searchable text. It's what makes a photo of a page copyable instead of just a picture.
- A scanned PDF is an image. You can't select or search its words until OCR recognises them.
- OCR quality depends on the source: sharp, straight, high-contrast scans convert far better than blurry or skewed photos.
- After OCR, a scanned document becomes searchable and its text can be extracted, copied or converted to Word.
Tools for OCR
Free, private and in your browser. No sign-up.
OCR PDF
Turn a scanned PDF into searchable, selectable text with in-browser OCR. Get a searchable PDF plus the extracted text: free, private, no uploads.
PDF to Word
Turn a PDF into an editable Microsoft Word (.docx) document, text extracted into clean, editable paragraphs, entirely in your browser with no upload.
PDF to Excel
Extract tables from a PDF into an editable spreadsheet, fix any cells, then download a real Excel.xlsx (or CSV). Best-effort, position-based table detection. Works best on clean tabular PDFs. Nothing is uploaded.
Extract Audio from Video
Pull the audio track out of any video and save it as MP3, WAV, AAC, M4A or OGG, right in your browser. Drop an MP4, MOV or WEBM, pick a format, preview and download. Nothing is uploaded.
OCR problems we solve
Hit one of these? Here's the fix.
- I need to turn a PDF into an editable Word documentNeed to reuse the text or make big changes? Convert the PDF to Word, edit in a familiar app, and convert back if you need a PDF again.
- I need to get a table out of a PDF into ExcelStop retyping figures. Convert the PDF's tables into a spreadsheet you can sort, total and edit.
Frequently asked questions
Keep exploring
Problems we solve
Definitions
From the blog
Common tasks
Try OCR PDF
Free, private and instant. Everything runs in your browser.