Copy Text from Anywhere on the Screen on Windows (with OCR)

Have you ever received a screenshot containing an URL (or any other long string of characters) that you needed to copy exactly, character-by-character, to get the verbatim text to put into some field elsewhere? If so, you will find value in using the Microsoft-provided PowerToys program.

It contains a few different utilities directed at power-users which are not integrated by default in Windows. The feature based in OCR (optical character recognition) is called “Text Extractor”, and it means that any text you can see on the screen you can copy to the clipboard, regardless if it's editable, contained in an image, or even written in a custom typeface.

I found it more intuitive to bind it to “Win + C”, as to mimic “Ctrl + C”, but with superpowers. Check it out, you can download it from here: Microsoft PowerToys.