OneNote OCR function takes too long

Question

One of my biggest use for OneNote at my job, is using it to quickly extract liquid texts from screen shots.

I am able to extract over 500 numerical invoice numbers in less than a minute, compare to if I had to manually 

typed them individually off the screen. I also use the keyboard shortcut Winlogo + S to perform the screen capture.

The problem is I cannot get these done the same way at home with my Mac.

The OCR takes forever to be available, the keyboard shortcut is a combo of too many keys.

I have Office 365 installed on my Mac with the latest High Sierra.

Whenever I try to extract texts from any images freshly pasted in my OneNote page,

it takes forever to see the contextual menu

"Copy text from picture"

to finally appear over the image 

 But when I perform above procedure at my employer computer, it performs instantly and I could extract my texts instantly.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, it's quite normal that OCR is much faster on OneNote for Windows (at least the desktop version, eg. OneNote 2016) than on the other OneNote clients (MacOS, iOS, Android, Windows 10 UWP app). The reason for this is, that OneNote 2016 uses an OCR engine that is part of Windows and therefore instantaneous. MacOS, for example, does not offer an own OCR that OneNote could use. So all text recognition is done on Microsoft's servers which process all requests from a waiting queue. That process can take up to several minutes until the indexing is done (I've even experienced hours, but I guess that was a glitch in the service).

There is no way to speed this process up, except for at least temporarily opening the notebooks in OneNote 2016 for Windows, to let it's local OCR kick in,

Answer 2

Apart from programs that bring their own OCR, I don't believe there is an equivalent for MacOS for the system-wide OCR of Windows, But even if there was one, OneNote would not automatically use it.

Answer 3

Your post describes it all. Thanks to know...Is there anyway to install an OCR engine that is part of Mac ?

Answer 4

Deleting those files listed didn't help,

But the post made below by SWischner makes more sense to explain the issue.

Is there anyway to install an OCR engine that is part of Mac ? As such will resolve.

Answer 5

A. Is your Office computer also Mac or Windows?

B. Are you following the below process

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/copy-t...

C. You can try below general troubleshooting steps for Onenote on Mac

1. Delete Onenote preferences

~Library/Containers/com.microsoft.onenote.mac/container.plist

~Library/Containers/com.microsoft.onenote.mac/Data/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.onenote.mac.plist

(Note - Library is a hidden folder. Hence, in your Finder > Go, you will need to hold ALT/Option key to make it visible)

2. Go to following folders

~Library/Containers and delete com.microsoft.onenote.mac folder

~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office and delete Onenote folder

3. Have you already gone through the steps outlined in "Fix issues when you can't sync OneNote"

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/fix-is....