- Windows 11’s Snipping Tool looks to be getting an improved OCR feature
- New OCR option can more easily copy text from anything on the monitor screen
- It’s still in testing but will hopefully come to the finished version of Windows 11 soon
Windows 11’s Snipping Tool could soon be powered up with an impressively easy new way to extract the text from anything on the screen.
This ability was uncovered in testing by regular contributor to Windows 11-related leaks on X, PhantomOfEarth. However, we aren’t told what build it came from, so presumably it was the latest preview release, or a recent one.
Snipping Tool is getting a fullscreen OCR text extractor that’s essentially the PowerToys tool, inbox – making use of the better OCR models used by Snipping Tool! Here’s a demo.Lets you copy text without having to take a screenshot to do so, Win+Shift+T will also be available. pic.twitter.com/zWteElK725February 20, 2025
You can see how it works to extract text (via OCR tech, or Optical Character Recognition) courtesy of a video of the feature in action in the above post on X.
To sum it up, the user invokes Windows 11’s Snipping Tool and then chooses the ‘Text Extractor’ function, drawing a box around the area of the screen that they want to pull text from.
Snipping Tool then highlights all the text inside the box and offers an option to copy it to the clipboard, and from there, it can be pasted to a document (or anywhere else).
It’s true that Snipping Tool already has an OCR ability, but it only works with a screenshot you’ve taken. This new approach is a much more streamlined and convenient way of working, as you can simply use the feature directly on whatever’s currently displayed on the monitor screen.
Analysis: A useful recruit from PowerToys
This gives Snipping Tool a lot of flexibility so you can, as shown in the above example, strip out all the text from a Windows 11 menu (should you want to). It’ll work for anything on the screen, and as you don’t need to take a screenshot anymore, this makes the OCR feature all the more convenient as noted.
This is something Microsoft has been working on for a while now, as PhantomOfEarth first observed the tool a few months back in November 2024. It has been considerably honed since then, and as the leaker points out, it’s now basically equivalent to the same functionality in Microsoft’s PowerToys suite of utilities.
With any luck, this slicker form of OCR for Snipping Tool could be arriving in the finished version of Windows 11 before too long.
Via XDA Developers