Most businesses have wizzbang printer copier devices that scan and email documents.  And many of these can create TIF documents.   Normally, TIFF files are pretty inefficient.  They are quite huge documents, but they have one big upside.  Common "OCR" (Optical Character Recognition) programmes can convert them into text.

 

The best OCR programs can do a great job, but they can also cost a lot of money. Mostly, all you want is to convert the files to text so that you can copy/paste the words into other programs.  So it'll come as a great bonus to find that Office 2007 can do OCR - so you don't need to buy an additional piece of software.

 

Look into your Office 'tools' menu and find "Document Imaging" :

Once you have opened the tool, you'll be able to then open a TIF file.

 

 

Now, you can convert it to text by simply clicking on the 'OCR' icon :  

When the document is scanned, you can then convert it to a Word document by clicking on the 'convert' icon :

 

Then, voila, the doucment text will be available in Word. 

Maybe not as polished and formatted as the original, but certainly something you can use to cut and paste from.  If that saves you having to retype a lengthy document, then it's got to be a good thing!