How Do I Edit Microsoft Office Document Imaging Files?

If you have ever taken a scan of a document or printed a document with Microsoft Office Document Image Writer, only to realise later that you need to make a change to it, you have probably found that with the common TIFF format it is very difficult to make the changes required.

Because of the encoding of a TIFF image, it is pretty much impossible to use the standard tools to edit such files. Edits that you might wish to attempt might include a resize, dropping a page from a longer document or even changing some text.

Opening the image in Microsoft Paint isn’t going to give you good results; meanwhile few people have access to Photoshop, and attempting to open all TIFF files with Microsoft Office Document Imaging will be time and resource consuming.

However, changes to TIFF files can be made with the IrfanView free software, available from www.irfanview.com.

Microsoft introduced a digital print option to Microsoft Office 2003 in order to offer an alternative to the already popular PDF format from Adobe.

Although better integrated and not requiring any additional specialist software – a viewer is provided in Microsoft Windows – the system failed to catch on, with users providing the more popular PDFs, even though they were in fact less portable than Microsoft Office Document Imaging prints in TIFF format!

Windows XP users might have already experienced Microsoft Office Document Imaging TIFFs – it is the default printer option when you first setup your XP installation.

After downloading and installing IrfanView, you are ready to edit your TIFF document. There are several options available: you can tweak the text in a document, apply general document formatting and even tweak the image with colour adjustments and effects.

We’ll proceed here with ways in which the text in a Microsoft Office Document Imaging TIFF can be edited or amended.

To begin, File > Open your TIFF document. It will be displayed in the main window of the application. From here, you can zoom in or out using the magnification icons – use these and the scroll bars to zoom into the area you wish to change.

Do not use the mouse pointer as this will select an area – you’re not quite ready to do this yet!

An edit you might wish to make might be to add additional text. You can do this by selecting an area with the mouse in which to add the text. Be precise where you select, as this cannot be changed afterwards.

Using the Edit > Insert text into selection field... command, type the additional text you require. You will see from the accompanying screen grab that I have typed my name in order to add it to the title of a script. Notice that there are text formatting options available at the foot of the text entry box.

Once happy with the changes, click on OK to accept them – you’ll be taken back to the main windows, where your changes will be visible to see!