Last night, I discovered a Microsoft Office program that I’ve never used before – and it’s actually quite a useful feature to know about.

I’d received a contract in .PDF format which needed to be signed and returned by fax or e-mail. I no longer have a fax machine (my ISP provides me with a fax-to-email service for receiving faxes and I very rarely send them). So, my problem was that once I’d printed and signed the (multiple page) contract, how could I digitise it again (as a single document, rather than several individual pages)? The answer was Microsoft Office Document Imaging – provided as part of Office XP and 2003 (and possibly in other versions too – I haven’t checked). This let me scan multiple pages into a single .TIF file, also offering optical character recognition (OCR) and annotation functionality (pens, highlighting, text and picture insert, etc.).

I’ve been using Microsoft Office for many years, and I’ve never used this feature before – it strikes me that it might be a useful piece of information for someone else too.