How to read text from images on Windows

There are all kinds of reasons why you might want to extract text out of images. Maybe you've taken photos of restaurant bills and you want to make a record of what you've eaten; or perhaps you've got a bunch of screenshots that you need to get product names out of; or you could have scanned in some important documents that need sorting. Whatever the reason, Windows comes with built-in tools for picking out text from image files (technically known as OCR, or Optical Character Recognition)--in fact, there are several different ways, so you can pick the one that suits you best. Here's how to get started, assuming you already have your images saved somewhere. The Snipping Tool is the easiest way to extract text from images on Windows.