You need to scan it to OCR to get what I think you want. OCR recognizes the words and you can open the file in a word processor.

sorry i'm just getting back bob.but what is OCR?

MY HP scanner sends directly to the My Scans folder in my documents, so I have never had a problem there, my series is F4180, so shouldn't be that far apart. Check and see where your scans are going, maybe they are sending elsewhere?

Optical character recognition. This is a program that tries to understand what is written so you can modify the text if you wish. Normally a scan creates an image, OCR creates a text file basically

You might find scanning newsprint leaves much to be desired, try a higher setting perhaps and see how it goes.

Maybe I misunderstood what you want Patricia. If you just want a copy and not something you want to use as text like a word document then you do not want OCR. When you said you wanted it in your documents folder I thought you wanted a document rather than a copy or picture. My scanner software gives me the ability to name a file what I want and where I want it saved. You might check and see if you have a folder like Shaddy.

bob,no i don't need word documents,just want it to go to my documents.i could do it on the hp printer i had befor,and i'm sure this is simple i'm just too simple or OLD.
thanks again patricia

Patricia my HP scanner (different model though) saves scans by default in a sub folder in My Documents called My scans. Then it creates sub folder inside My scans for each month.

There seems to be no way I can change the save location, HP once again proving they are in charge.

thanks everyone,i'm gonna try