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You can hire an individual to do it for as low as US$1 per page, or hire a transcription service that can charge US$6 per page or more and take two weeks to get it to you. Probably the most reliable method (aside from doing it yourself) but has lots of downsides. It works with Microsoft Word.Ī transcriptionist to type your handwritten notes to text. Available for PC and Mac, and on the iOS for mobiles. One of the most recommended speech-to-text programs is Dragon NaturallySpeaking from Nuance. You’d also have to be willing to slowly, patiently read every page of every notebook you want to save. In order for this to work, you need a top-notch program that translates with few mistakes. Speech-to-text software that will turn your notes into the plain text as you read them aloud from your notebooks.
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OCR programs include SoftWriting, ABBY FineReader and a few other top-rated OCR programs. OCR is almost useless with cursive handwriting. The problem here is that the handwriting must be very clean, and the software probably still won’t recognize everything. Use OCR (optical character recognition) software to “read” your documents and convert them to text.
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The bottom line is that there are a few options, none of them optimal. It seems there is no really good way of converting handwritten notes to text. That’s why I was really excited the other day when I saw a headline in the Guardian, “ How can I convert my handwritten notes into Word documents?” Unfortunately, my excitement had dimmed considerably by the time I finished reading.
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As you can imagine, it’s a tedious process. So, what I end up doing periodically is transcribing my handwritten notes book by book into Microsoft OneNote. It’s frustrating when I can remember writing down some brilliant idea that’s hanging right there at the edge of my memory, and I have to flip through every page of a dozen notebooks just to find it. The problem is that I end up with a whole lot of written material with no easy way to organize it and little to no searchability. Over the years, we’ve heard from many of you who feel exactly the same way. Something about that just seems to suck all the creativity right out of the process. I prefer writing on paper with a pen and have no interest in using handwriting apps for the smartphone, digital pensor tablet and stylus to capture my thoughts. Like a lot of you, I carry a notebook every day and take a ton of handwritten notes about almost everything from grocery lists to my someday novel.
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