I have a Dell 942 AIO printer, which I had gotten used some time ago. I use the scanner for faxing and emailing and it works great! However, I cannot scan a document to Microsoft Word or Wordpad, etc. I get an error message stating that I have to download the OCR application from the Dell CD. Unfortunately, I do not have a Dell CD. How can I get around this problem? There are many times when it would be so convenient to be able to scan to Word and I get so frustrated. Any help will be appreciated.:confused::rolleyes:

First OCR is not that accurate. It depends on the quality of the original and how that document is formatted.

Having said that, you may be able to download the OCR from DEll's website. Just enter the model and search for downloads.

If that doesn't work, then there are several OCR packages on the market, Omnipage, Iris, Abbey are some of the names. Just Google OCR software and you will find some. Some might even have free trials. They may not work directly with your AIO, so you might have to scan to a TIF first then have the OCR software read the TIF file.

I understand how to download OCR software and I do appreciate your recommendations. However, I do not know how to make the software work with my scanner. Words of one syllable or less would be a great help because I am not a computer whiz!

I answered that. I don't know if you can use a third party software automatically. If you can download the software from Dell, when you install it, it should plug into the scanner software.
But if you can't get it to work directly, you can still make it work by scanning to a TIF and then opening the TIF with the OCR software.