Originally Posted by tarquinious

A scanner will scan any item placed on it and allow you to save the result as any one of those graphic formats you listed. The key here is that those are graphics i.e the scanner doesn't know if you are scanning a document, photo, or your big toe.

In order to get your scanned file into a format which represents letters and number (i.e. into MS Word) you need to find a piece of software to perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on that file. This software looks at the file and recognises the shapes as letters and will produce a file containing the words you have scanned.

OCR is never 100% and depending on the quality of the image, can be notoriously bad in fact at recognising the words - often resulting in a document of half words and garbled sentences.

If you do a search on the Internet for OCR Software, you should find plenty of free products you can use. There are probably others on the forum that can make a recommendation here, but I don't do much scanning these days so couldn't recommend anything myself.

The other thought is that you probably have OCR software with your scanner, so look around at what you installed when you set up your scanner and see if anything looks like OCR software.

Good luck.