How do I edit a document on microsoft word?

Question

I have an attachment that has been emailed to me.When I open it it opens in Microsoft Photo Editor.I then copy and paste this into Microsoft word as I need to make some alterations to it but after clicking on the page it wont let me make any alterations.What am i doing wrong?

Answer 1

First, you can't type over a raw scanned document in MS Word. Some people have suggested using text boxes, but I've never used them and can't vouch for their effectiveness.

Second, just changing the file extension from .jpg to .doc has the same effect as replacing the cover of a book in a foreign language with one in English.  The contents remain the same.

You could run what's called an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program (one may have come with the scanner) on the scan and convert it to text that Word can handle, but OCR is an art, not a science. I can almost guarantee that you will have to fix:

1.Mis-converted fonts.

2.Mis-read characters (i for l, for instance, o, 0 or Q mixups)

3.Mangled layout.

Good luck if you do try it.

Answer 2

that's because your copying an image not a document. Try renaming the file extension to .doc

it could be that you haven't been sent a word document, just an image, in which case you cant edit it.

Answer 3

It opens in MS Photo Editor because it is an image of a document, not a document itself.  Someone scanned an image (or it is the equivalent of a PDF) and this is what you are looking at.

You can't edit it with MS word.  You copied and pasted it into a document, but that is the same as copying and pasting any image into a word document.

You might be able to edit the image with the Photo Editor, or another program like GIMP or Photoshop, but it will never look like you just replaced words in a word processing document.

If you look at the original email, you can see the file extension.  It was most likely a .jpg or .bmp or .tiff... what it needed to be was .doc or .rtf or .txt in order for you to be able to edit it.  Email them back and ask them if they scanned that before they sent it to you.