What Is Microsoft Office Document Image Writer?

The Microsoft Office Document Image Writer is a software driver that is part of Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI) and allows a user to save a particular Microsoft Office document as an image. Specifically the format is either a Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) or Microsoft Office Document Imaging Format (MDI).

Types

The Microsoft Office Document Image Writer is included as part of Microsoft Office 2003's document imaging capability. This feature is available as part of the Office 2003 versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Publisher, Access, Outlook, and OneNote. Office 2007 does include a Document Image Writer for Word and OneNote, but only if the applications are running on a 32-bit operating system. 64-bit operating systems are not supported.

Benefits

Microsoft Office Document Imaging offers several benefits. For instance, a user viewing an Office document image will see the document in its original format, regardless if Microsoft Office is installed on the user's computer. A user can also create an electronic copy of scanned documents to facilitate sharing of documents over the Internet or via e-mail.

Microsoft Office Document Imaging also performs optical character recognition (OCR). This feature allows the document's text to be recognized as text rather than an image. This makes it easier to search these documents later on in an electronic document archival system.

Alternatives

Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF) is one alternative to Microsoft Office Document Imaging. Adobe Acrobat creates images in PDF format and performs OCR on scanned documents.

Additionally, Microsoft Office 2007 saves a document as a PDF or an XML Paper Specification (XPS) format. This gives the user the benefits of the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer, but also meets industry standards for imaging, printing, document storage, and archival of electronic documents.

Future Roadmap

According to Microsoft's product guidance as of March 2010, Microsoft eliminated the Document Image Writer from Office 2010. Office 2010 leverages the Windows Fax driver to generate TIFF images.

Office 2010 still has the ability to save files as a PDF or XPS format.

Other Considerations

The value of any document imaging solution is the "what you see is what you get" (WYSWIG) benefit. By leveraging the imaging tools available in Microsoft Office or other software vendors, documents look and feel as the original author intended.

References

• About Microsoft Office Document Imaging
• XML Paper Specifications: Overview
• Changes in Word 2010
• Microsoft Support: 64-bit Image Writer Issues