One of our Geeks on Tour members recently posted a question in our forum about scanning a preprinted form.  A past Picasa tip explains how you can scan things just using your scanner and Picasa – no scanner software to learn.  This member needed to scan a preprinted form and she was disappointed that she couldn’t bring it into Word and fill in the blanks.

I started explaining to her that you can’t scan a form and then fill it in unless you were using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and that would be a lot more work.  She would either have to handwrite in the blanks, or find an old typewriter somewhere.

Then I got to thinking … ‘If it was just one fill in the blank, I’d try doing it with Picasa’s text tool!’ (Member Tutorial Video: Adding Text to Pictures)

So, for the fun of it, I scanned a form I had from a doctor’s office and tried using Picasa to fill out the first blank.  Here’s the blank form after scanning it and viewing with Picasa:

It was pretty easy to use the text tool, size and position today’s date to fill in the first blank.  I assumed that you could only use Picasa’s text tool once per picture.  I was ecstatically wrong!

Just click apply after filling in each blank and you can then click the text tool and start over for the next blank.

OMG that was soo easy!

This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Geeks on Tour is a membership website with hundreds of Tutorial Videos on topics of interest to travelers, such as managing digital photos with Picasa, Route-Planning with Streets and Trips, and sharing your travels with a website using Blogger or with friends on Facebook. You can subscribe to our free e-newsletters, or become a paid member and be able to view all of the videos in the Learning Library.