How OneNote Can Help You Transcribe Documents

OneNote is my program of choice for transcribing newspapers. It's OCR tools, instant copy paste photo insertion, and flexible formatting functionalities make it a breeze to transcribe documents in no time at all. This post will take you through my transcription workflow, allowing you to just as easily transcribe your source material in a matter of minutes.

What is OCR and Why Should You Use It?

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. A character is a single letter within a word. OCR programs will 'look' at an image and identify the characters inside, allowing you to copy and paste text from an image. Using OCR programs will make transcribing go much quicker since the computer does most of the work, allowing you to spend more of your time researching and making discoveries.

1. Insert Your Source Image into One Note

There are lots of ways you can do this, but I will just show an example of one. Much of the time I am not transcribing a full image, but just a portion of one. Thus I usually only want to import a portion of an image into One Note. Windows operating system has a nice little tool called 'snipping tool' which will capture just a section of your screen for you, which is exactly what we need.

For my main image, I will use page 40 from the 1931 Bethany Daisy, my largest currently ongoing transcription project. Here is the image if you wish to follow along:

Page 40 of the Bethany Daisy

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I would like to transcribe Carl B. Anderson's name, location, and clubs. First I zoom into that part of the picture using my standard image viewer (I'm using photo gallery, but anything that lets you see the picture will do just fine).

Here I have zoomed in far enough to clearly see all the text

To open snipping tool, I hit the windows key on my keyboard. type "snipping tool" and press enter. That brings up a nice little box with a couple options for taking screenshots.

The Snipping Tool

You may be wondering how I took a screenshot of snipping tool in the picture above. This is another little tip you may find useful when you are trying to work as quickly as possible; I used the keyboard shortcut Windows key + shift + s. That will bring up a cursor which you can drag across the screen to take a screenshot. When you release the mouse key the screenshot you took will be placed on your clipboard, and you can paste it into any application you would like (such as OneNote). That way you don't even have to open snipping tool.

However, for my own sake, this tutorial will continue showing the steps using snipping tool, as it is much easier for me to provide visuals for snipping tool than for the keyboard shortcut version.

So, now that you have snipping tool open and your image zoomed into the words you plan on transcribing, press the 'new' button on snipping tool and click and drag your mouse across the text. After you have taken the screenshot, simply paste it into your OneNote Notebook.

The screenshot copied in OneNote

2. Extracting the Text

After pasting the image wait a second or two so that OneNote can process the image. Then simply right click the image and select 'Copy Text From Picture'.

The 'Copy Text From Picture' option

Then click the are to the right of the image to create a new textbox and paste the text inside.

The OCR text next to the image text

It's actually pretty accurate spitting out the following text:

CARL B. ANDERSON
Lindsborg,
Alpha Sigma Nu, Pi Kappa Delta, "B"
Kan.
Club,
Debate, Football.
ZONA L. WHEELER
Bridgeport, Kan
Delta Phi Delta, Smoky Hill Art Club. 

In fact, the only thing it got wrong was the order of the lines. This is what my human corrected text looks like:

CARL B. ANDERSON
Lindsborg, Kan.
Alpha Sigma Nu, Pi Kappa Delta, "B" Club,
Debate, Football. 

ZONA L. WHEELER
Bridgeport, Kan.
Delta Phi Delta, Smoky Hill Art Club. 

You can then paste it into whatever word processing program you want and apply appropriate formatting/ italicize and the bold the text as you wish.

Final Thoughts

Please note that the OCR tools in OneNote are not suitable for handwriting (in most cases) or extremely damaged text. They are, however, perfect for text such as the type shown above with fairly clear lettering.