A little while back, I covered how the Snipping Tool on Windows 11 was getting a new OCR feature. At the time of writing, it’s still in the preview channel, so only those who opt into Windows beta builds can access it. However, it shouldn’t be too long until it arrives on the release branch.
But who wants to wait that long? I was really curious as to how it works. After all, if it ends up being a killer new addition, anyone using Windows 11 won’t require a third-party app, extension, or online service to extract text from an image. Just do it all from the Snipping Tool, which is only a keypress away. Sounds ideal.
To get a head start and check out this feature before it releases, I downloaded the Canary build for Windows 11 and waited for Microsoft to grant me access to the new Snipping Tool feature. Well, it just arrived on my computer, so let’s get stuck in!
It’s very easy to invoke
Just a few actions and you’re there
The first thing I noticed is how easy it was to get started with the new OCR feature. You don’t need to enable anything new once you have the update; instead, just bring up the Snipping Tool like you normally would. However, on the right side of the bar is a brand new button. Click on this, draw a box around the text, and Windows will start chewing it over.
Once it’s done, you’ll see a button on the Snipping Tool bar to copy the text. Click that, and the text hops onto your clipboard. Now you can paste it anywhere you’d like. It’s a super-easy tool to use, and I’m sure it’ll be a hit among Windows users if Microsoft keeps it this easy to use.
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It works great with regular text that isn’t in an image
Although I’m not 100% sure when I’d use it like that
To give this feature a try, I headed over to a website to look for text to extract from an image. As I looked, a thought popped into my head: is it possible to extract text from a website, and not an image? So, I brought up the Snipping Tool, highlighted some text, and clicked the “copy text” button. Sure enough, the Snipping Tool did extract the text I highlighted, presumably by grabbing a screenshot of the article and then extracting the data from that.
I’m not certain as to when I would use the Snipping Tool to extract text from an article when I could just copy-paste the words directly, but I did notice that when I pasted the text, it was still formatted to how it appeared in the article. I can see this being useful if you’re struggling to copy text from a website, or if you want to keep its formatting. Otherwise, copy-pasting should work fine.
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Grabbing easily readable text from an image works great
Now we’re cooking
While anyone can copy-paste text from an article, the real test is how the Snipping Tool handles images with text. That way, people don’t have to retype what they read in an image; instead, they can grab the text using the OCR tool and paste it wherever it needs to go, saving a ton of time in the process.
Given my suspicions that the Snipping Tool captures a screenshot of the area and then performs OCR on it, I expected the results from the image-based text to be identical to those from the article-based text. They’re both going through the exact same process, after all. Sure enough, it worked just the same, and very accurately.
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Handwritten text detection is significantly hit or miss
Mostly miss, though
So, the tool can register simple fonts, but what about handwriting? Unfortunately, this is where it all fell apart. I first tried a passage of text that, admittedly, even I had issues reading, and the Snipping Tool just straight up refused to try. Then I attempted on some readable handwriting, and the OCR tool got it, but made a lot of mistakes. Finally, I tried it on text generated by a computer to look like handwriting, and it failed there, too.
As such, if you’re going to use this feature, I suggest only using it on static, easy-to-read fonts. As soon as you go into human handwriting territory, things begin hiccuping big time.
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The Snipping Tool is perfect…for fonts
While I am sad that this new tool crumbles when given handwriting to analyze, I’m at least very pleased with its ability to read simple fonts. It should speed up the process of grabbing text from an image by a lot, and help boost my productivity as a result. Now I just have to wait for it to arrive on the release branch.
