Copy from a .tif

if you can highlight the text you can right click the highlighted text and pick copy. then open a word doc and right-click on a blank portion of a document and pick paste.

A standard tif file is an image / picture file format.

While you can cut and paste with an image editor, the best way to extract text from a tif file is with optical character recognition software such as TextBridge.

If you have a document scanner, it may have come with an optical character recognition program.

Just install and run the program.
When you open a file, choose the tif file that you need to copy the text from and allow the software to process the file.

Chas

It's all about the software.

We do this here at work...we process probably 100,000 to 150,000 W-4's a month.

Depending on your needs, the hardest part and the software gets better everyday, is to train the software to recognize handwriting.

If you can move to a block style form or some sort of standardized format, it's much easier AND you can even have the software move to and highlight parts of the image.

But yes, it is an image not a document...there's a conversion of sorts and that's where your pick of software is the key.