Getting Rid of a Bunch of Frames

Anthony Warner recently wrote to describe a problem he was having. He uses Omnipage Pro to scan information into Word files, but the files contain many frames. Anthony wondered if there was a way, perhaps in a macro, to remove all the frames in a single operation.

While a macro can certainly be written to remove all the frames (and retain the text), that may not be the best approach in this particular situation. The best solution may be in the scanning process itself. Omnipage Pro allows you to scan text in several different formats. Unfortunately, the way that these formats are described within the program varies based on the version you are using. In other words, Omnipage Pro 10 uses different terminology than Omnipage Pro 11, etc. Be that as it may, with a little experimentation, you should be able to get the text you want without all the frames.

When scanning text, the Omnipage Pro Wizard helpfully asks if you want to retain the original page's appearance. How is this appearance retained? Through the use of frames. If you don't want the frames, indicate that you don't want to retain the appearance. Omnipage will scan the text, and you can then format it as desired in Word.

If you are not using Omnipage Pro's Wizard, then look for settings which allow you to scan a document as unformatted text or as "retain font and paragraph view." Experiment with these settings to make sure that you are getting what you want in the files created by Omnipage Pro. Even though the unformatted text that results from Omnipage Pro may look worse (at first glance), if you attach a Word template to the file and apply pre-defined styles, your document can look great in no time.

You can also, if desired, force Omnipage Pro to save its output in RTF format rather than in Word format. This will remove all the Word frames, because those objects are not supported in RTF. Similarly, if you already have a group of scanned documents that contain frames, you can save the documents in RTF format and then open them in Word. The frames should be gone.

A related approach is to copy everything in the Omnipage-created Word document, paste it all into WordPad (which doesn't support frames), copy all the text in the WordPad document, and paste it back into the Word document. This "round trip" approach will remove all the frames.

You might also try selecting the entire document created by Omnipage Pro (press Ctrl+A), and then press Ctrl+Q. This sets every paragraph back to its default condition. Chances are good that the frames are not a part of the base styles used in the document, so using Ctrl+Q results in the frames being removed with the rest of the explicit, non-default paragraph formatting.