ABBYY FineReader Professional is a powerful OCR application that will quickly extract the text from almost any image.

The program can import images directly from any TWAIN or WIA-compatible scanner. And if that's not convenient, it can also import PDF files and graphics in most common formats, so for example you could in theory take a photo of a document and work from the image.

FineReader then uses ABBYY's Adaptive Document Recognition Technology to identify and analyse various elements of your document: tables of contents, headers, footers, page numbers, footnotes and more.

And so if you save the scanned document to a Microsoft Word DOCX file, say, you don't only get the text - it's also formatted correctly (so headers and footers in the image become Word headers and footers in the finished file).

Support for 186 recognition languages (including 39 with dictionary support) helps to ensure a high level of accuracy. And when the process is over, you're able to save the final document in a variety of formats, including Microsoft Word (DOC, DOCX), Excel (XLS, XSLX), PowerPoint (PPTX), RTF, PDF, HTML and more.

Please note, the trial version of the program will expire after 30 days, or when it's scanned 100 pages, whichever comes first. Additionally, it only allows you to save 3 pages at a time. All these restrictions are of course removed if you purchase a licence.