A reader wants to know how to convert a picture of text to text.
“I received the attached message, one of several, in picture form, from a friend yesterday who uses iPad.
I want to copy the body of the message to paste into Word so I can remove her info from it, but cannot figure out how. Can you please help? Since I’m convinced you know just about everything in this field. I’m confident you can, and it’ll be simple, just I’M NOT GETTING IT!! Your help is very much appreciated.”
Instead of simply forwarding you a message via Messenger, your friend appears to have taken a screenshot of her iPad screen and attached that to an email. If it were an actual message you could either press and hold to copy the text on a phone or tablet or highlighted the text on your computer.
Since this is a picture you could just choose to right-click and save it to preserve the information. But if you would like it as editable text, there’s a fairly simple way.
I notice that you have a Gmail address. That means you can use a neat feature of Google Drive to convert that picture to text.
Open your Gmail inbox, click the square of squares at the upper-right, and choose Drive.
Click the gear icon to the right and choose Settings.
Tick the box next to Convert uploads.
Upload the PDF or picture to Google Drive.
Right-click the file and choose Open with and then Google Docs.
The document will show the original image.
But keep scrolling and you’ll find the editable text.
You can edit, copy, or print this text.
SUPER … just how do you know all this stuff?