Text Grab — The Complete Guide: Windows Screen OCR for Text and Tables
Text Grab is a screen OCR tool for Windows that works entirely locally. It is especially useful to engineers because of its table view: you can copy a table of values from a scanned PDF or an image and paste it into a spreadsheet.
Text Grab
Joseph Finney
A Windows screen-OCR tool — copies text and tables from screenshots, images and windows, all locally.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Area or word selection — mark a region or click individual words.
- Floating frame — a transparent window that reads the text beneath it.
- Edit window — clean up with regular expressions, find and replace, and a table view.
- QR codes and folders — read QR codes and run OCR on a whole folder.
- Command line — for use in scripts.
What is free and what is paid
The GitHub build is open source (MIT) and free for any use, including commercial work. The Microsoft Store edition is paid and adds AI-based recognition on Copilot+ PCs. The tool is available for Windows only.
Related tools
A cross-platform alternative — NormCap. For annotated screenshots — Greenshot. For OCR of whole PDF files — OCRmyPDF.
NormCap
dynobo
A screenshot tool that captures text instead of images — mark an area and the text goes to the clipboard.
Get it from the vendorGreenshot
Greenshot team
A lightweight Windows screenshot tool with arrows, highlights, blurring and export to file, printer or Office.
Get it from the vendor
OCRmyPDF
OCRmyPDF project
Adds a searchable text layer to scanned PDFs — old reports, standards and drawings become searchable.
Get it from the vendorMicrosoft PowerToys
Microsoft
A set of Windows utilities — on-screen OCR, screen ruler, bulk rename, window layouts and colour picker.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
For anyone on Windows who copies values out of images, Text Grab saves typing and typos. The free build covers most of the work.