OCR program

JOCR is a little program that can capture an image from any part of the desktop and perform optical character recognition (convert images to text) on the contents. It is free to download and use but it uses a resource provided with MS Office, and requires that Microsoft Office 2003 or higher be installed on the machine where it is used.

• Works remarkably well; OCR conversion is instant and the results are respectable (no OCR recognition is ever 100% accurate)
• Can clip any area or window on the desktop, or the entire desktop.
• Results are dumped into a notepad text file, where they can be edited and/or clipped.
• Does NOT require JAVA (despite the name).
• Extremely small footprint; very low on resources.
  

The recognizable languages by MODI and JOCR are, in the alphabetical order, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish. Confirm your available language by executing "Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office Tools > Microsoft Office Document Imaging" and selecting "Tools > Options > OCR tab > OCR Language"

I’ve been looking for a freeware OCR program that does exactly this sort of thing. The only drawback with this is the MS Excel requirement; otherwise it is a very simple, straightforward program that works well.

Source:freewaregenius