How to Capture Text in Images with OneNote 2013

Updated November 2, 2021

Microsoft OneNote is a one-stop shop for many office needs, and you can add text OCR (optical character recognition) to that list by following this groovy guide.

Did you know that OneNote has a built-in feature to snag text from photos? When you upload images to a service like Google Docs, the web server uses OCR technology to read the text in the image and convert it to digital type. This process works similarly in OneNote and doesn’t require uploading your (possibly sensitive) data to a third-party web server.

The first step is to place the picture you want to scan text from your OneNote 2013 workbook. You can do this by pasting the image in or selecting it through the Insert > Pictures button from the ribbon.

With a photo in OneNote, right-click the image, and from the context menu, choose “Copy Text from Picture.”

OneNote will instantly grab all of the text from the image and then paste it into a giant text block. From there, you can copy the text and paste it wherever you want.

Note that the OneNote’s OCR capability isn’t 100% accurate, but you can increase the accuracy by pulling text from high-resolution, high-quality images.