PNG to Word Converter

PNG compresses without loss. Every pixel of a screenshot is stored exactly as it was on screen, so the edges of letters stay sharp and the background stays a flat color. That is ideal for text recognition, because the shapes the recognizer compares are not blurred or speckled by compression, as they often are in a JPG.

The sheet below lists the format's main traits. PNG has been an open W3C and ISO standard for decades, and almost every operating system saves screenshots in it by default, which is why it is the most common source for this conversion after phone photos.

A PNG can also be very large, since lossless storage of a full-screen capture on a high-resolution display takes several megabytes. That is not a problem here: files of up to 95 MB are accepted, and the size of the PNG has no effect on the size of the Word document, which holds text rather than pixels.

The weak point of screenshots is size, not quality. Body text in an app or on a web page is often only 10 to 16 pixels tall, and the lowercase letters are smaller still. A printed page scanned at 300 dpi gives a recognizer letters several times that size. With very few pixels per letter, an e and a c, or an rn and an m, can look almost the same.

The fix is simple: make the text bigger before you capture it. Zoom the browser or app to 150 or 200 percent, or use a high-resolution display setting, and take the screenshot then. The PNG will be larger, but every letter gets more pixels and the Word document will need far fewer corrections. Scaling a small screenshot up afterward does not help, because it adds no new detail.

Cropping helps as well. A full-screen capture includes menus, toolbars and notifications that the recognizer will dutifully turn into text. Capture only the window or the region you need, or cut the picture down with Crop Image first, and the Word file will contain just the content you were after.

Two options that help with photos of paper are off here. Straighten pages corrects a page photographed at a slight angle, and Auto rotate turns a sideways photo upright. A screenshot is already level and upright, so neither has anything to fix, and skipping them avoids small errors on images with diagonal design elements or rotated text.

Everything else stays as on the main tool: Preserve layout rebuilds columns, headings and tables in Word, and Keep pictures places icons, charts and photos from the screenshot into the document. If the screenshot comes from a dark-mode app with light text on a dark background, try it with Enhance contrast off first and again with it on, then keep the better result; thin light strokes on dark backgrounds react differently from print on paper.

People convert screenshots to Word when the original text cannot be copied: a page of a locked PDF viewer, a slide shared as an image, a chart label in a presentation, or a set of instructions sent as pictures. In each case the result is a document you can edit, quote and search, instead of a picture you have to retype from.

For photos of printed pages, which are usually JPG, the JPG to Word page keeps straightening and contrast enhancement on. For several screenshots that should end up in one Word file, merge them into a PDF with Image to PDF first and convert that.

Exported slides and infographics saved as PNG work the same way. Text set in large, plain fonts converts almost perfectly; decorative lettering, text over photos and words set along a curve are the parts most likely to need fixing by hand.