Can I save a scanned document as a word document with less bytes?

[Secretary]

I want to save to disc a large number of documents that need to be scanned.
They appear after scanning in windows Photo gallery. I would like to save
them as a document and would it take up less room.

 

[Peter T. Daniels]

You could use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software to change
them from graphics into text, but then you'd have to do a lot of
proofreading. (Everyone says storage is cheap these days. You could
keep them on a flash drive.)

 

[macropod]

Hi Secretary,

You can minimise the storgae space requirements by limiting the scanning resolution and colour depth (eg 200dpi b/w) and saving each
page as a compressed TIFF (or perhaps GIF) image. To combine multi-page documents into a single file, you could use a PDF
converter/distiller. As Peter said, though, conversion to text via OCR (if you don't have graphics on the pages) would deliver the
greatest storage savings.