Almost all recent scanners have an inbuilt OCR that can manage an image to text conversion, but what if you wish to perform OCR on an image file that you received in mail. You obviously won't print the document and then scan it again to get the Text right :)
As always, there is a solution for this. The easiest method would be doing it online. Just visit OnlineOCR
Some key features for OnlineOCR
1) Online OCR supports 28 languages world wide
2) It can handle 8 file formats
> PDF (All types of PDF files including multi-page PDFs)
> TIF/TIFF (Multipage TIFFs supported)
> JPEG/JPG
> BMP
> PCX
> PNG
> GIF
> ZIP files containing the above types of files can also be uploaded.
3) Service gives possibility to convert the output in 6 formats
> Adobe PDF
> MS Word 2003/XP
> MS Excel 2003/XP
> Html 4.0
> RTF
> Text Plain
4) Its free to use for 5 images
The only drawback I see here is... Once you create an account, you get just 5 free credits and each credit lets u convert 1 entire page. In simple terms, 1 account = 5 credits....Now I don't have to tell you how to go about this :)
Still further, if you want some more credits, you can participate in their free bonus credit programs or simply purchase the credits if you like it.
