A scanner captures a picture of the page. Although you can embed that
picture in Word, you won't be able to type in it.
That gap is filled by software called Optical Character Recognition,
or OCR. This software looks at the image in the picture and tries to
"read" it character by character. The result is placed in a Word
document. Some programs are better at this than others.
Most scanners include a simple OCR program in their software bundle,
more as an advertisement for their separately priced (usually
expensive) software than as something that's really useful. The big
names in OCR software are Abbyy FineReader (
www.abbyy.com) and Nuance
(formerly ScanSoft) OmniPage (
www.nuance.com). Recent versions of MS
Office include the Microsoft Office Document Imaging program.
Most OCR programs are not well adapted for dealing with forms -- the
lines and boxes get in the way of interpreting the text. Nuance sells
OmniForm, which is supposed to be better tuned for this. Unless you
have an office where you scan dozens or hundreds of forms every day,
though, it's likely to be too expensive.
When you take into account the effort needed to scan, recognize,
correct, fill in, and save most forms, it's usually more effective to
reconstruct the form from scratch instead.
