How to Scan a Document & Fill in the Blanks
By Peter Franczyk
Document sometimes have blanks that need to be filled out. Some paper documents still require you to fill in the blanks by hand. As the Internal Revenue Service points out in its instructions for the 1099 form, although handwritten forms are acceptable, they must be completely legible and accurate to avoid processing errors. Thus, it may be safer if you scan the document and fill in the blanks using your computer to avoid any misinterpretation.
Scan the document to your computer according to your scanner's instructions as a picture format such as JPEG or TIFF. If your scanner only scans to Adobe PDF format, convert it by simply scanning the document to PDF, open the PDF and use the "Save as" function to save as a JPEG or TIFF.
Open the picture of the scanned document using Microsoft Paint and locate one of the blanks that you want to fill in. You can use the scroll bars to move around the document and zoom button to focus in on any blank fields.
Select the "Text" button on the Paint toolbar, then click and hold your left mouse button in the blank field where you want to enter information. Move your mouse around to resize the text box so that it is large enough to hold the information you want to enter, and release the mouse button. If you are unhappy with the position of the text box, click and hold one of the edges of the box and drag it to a more desirable position.
Click inside of your text box using the left mouse button and begin typing the desired text. Change the font or font size of what you are typing or have typed by using the "Text" toolbar drop-downs just as you would in a word-processing document.
Fill out the rest of the blanks in the document using the same technique.
References
Tips
- While using Paint, hit Ctrl+Z or select "Undo" under the "Edit" drop-down menu to undo any mistakes.
Writer Bio
Peter Franczyk has been writing professionally since 2001 and has been published in multiple peer-reviewed biotechnology journals such as "Transfusion." He holds a Bachelor of Science in engineering from a land-grant university and a Master of Science in the life sciences from a leading research university.