My professor needs to have her published economics instructor's manual scanned into a Word document . What scanner and software is capable of doing this? The office has an old HP ScanJet 4C flatbed scanner. Thanks.

You need a scanner that support OCR... this doesn't always work very well but here is a site that offers some more info on ocr scanning http://www.homeandoffice.hp.com/hho/html/711-0-0-225-121.html

Most scanners come with some sort of OCR software that will scan (with varying degrees of accuracy) documents into editable text files.

The cleaner and plainer the copy the more accurate the scan. The 4C included such software. If the software you have won't scan directly to Word you can scan to a text file and open that file in Word for formatting.

We discovered that a piece of software for the OCR (OmniPage Pro) had not been installed on the computer. However, Word 2000 still does not have "acquire text" in the drop-down menu under "file" like the old computer had. Thanks for all the help.

In your scanning software just choose scan to Microsoft word as an ocr document