<p>As you will be able to tell from my question, I am not a computer expert and my brain is really fuzzy this morning. Last year, my computer died without any warning and I lost my husband’s Christmas card list (he has accumulated addresses over 65 years and I transferred them to the computer 15 years ago). I have a paper copy with lots of penciled in corrections. I can scan the list into the computer but how do I convert it so that I can make corrections? Or is this not doable and I will have to retype 27 pages of names and addresses.</p>
<p>My scanner came with OCR (optical character recognition) software that works fairly well. There are also free or free-trial programs you can download by googling "free ocr software for mac). You’ll want to have the highest quality scan as possible and there will still probably be mistakes so be sure to proof against your hard copy. You’ll probably need to key in the handwritten corrections yourself.</p>
<p>Thanks, I guess that I will have to make a trip to the Apple store to see if they can help me; I can’t find anything in the printer software and cannot find any info online that gives me a solution. I know that the ocr is not very accurate so even using it would be a lot of work but retyping all those pages is not a job that I want to do right now.</p>
<p>Can you hire a kid in the neighborhood (or someone who types for a living) to key in those addresses? Someone might want to make some extra money for the holidays.</p>
<p>Also, you may be able to take the hard drive out and access the info on it and transfer it to your new computer even if your old computer went kaput. I’d try that first.</p>
<p>This might be difficult for you but you can open up the Mac and take out the drive and buy a cheap enclosure with USB interface, plug in the drive into the enclosure and attach it to any computer (preferably a Mac) through the USB port and try to get to your data file in the drive.</p>
<p>I guess that it wasn’t a dumb question. I went to the Apple store and my “experts” didn’t really have a good answer. They did suggest that I check out Readiris but I found a better one recommended that had a 15 day trial period. It surprises me that more people wouldn’t want/need ocr software.</p>