Best software for converting scanned text to editable Microsoft Word docs?

Does anyone know how this works?

Any decent Optical Character Recognition software.
Basically, the better the accuracy, the more you’re gonna pay. Plus, everything really boils down to how good your template is and how clean your scan looks... we're talking percentages here: nobody ever hits that perfect 100% accuracy mark...
If 97% sounds great to you, try counting the characters on a single page... I was looking at a basic memo: 165 words, 1,226 characters, which means a 97% accurate tool still leaves you with about 37 typos... scattered all over half a page of text, so good luck hunting them down. It's a bit easier when it's just minor punctuation glitches, but that adds up fast on a long document... It's not all bad news, though: Adobe Acrobat claims they hit 99.8% accuracy...

That's all just theory, though. In the real world:
- You get some mediocre version of OCR software bundled with every scanner (does anyone actually buy those anymore?)
- There are online converters, but honestly, they usually only process the first page as a demo before demanding cash for the rest.
- You can use Microsoft OneNote from the Microsoft Office suite: just upload an image, right-click, select "Copy text from picture...", then paste it into Microsoft Word... but man, that's such a hassle...
- You could grab some free software, like: FreeOCR and just fix the errors manually... just a heads-up, this one requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 to be installed.

Either way, you're gonna end up with unformatted, messy text—basically just a raw dump of whatever the software recognized based on the original layout—so expect to spend plenty of time cleaning it up so it actually looks professional.
Regardless, instead of typing out stacks of pages by hand, this is a pretty helpful solution, even if low-quality scans give everyone a headache.

Hope you find this useful, and please don't use it to plagiarize some college thesis like those shady politicians back home...😁

Accuracy goes way up if the software comes with its own built-in dictionary or spellchecker (Adobe Acrobat has one for American English)