Text extraction software?

I'm looking for some software for work projects that will let me scan a hard copy of a document into a .pdf format or something like that, then extract the characters from the scanned file into actual text that I could paste into Excel, etc. I've seen really expensive stuff that does this, but I have to think there's a cheap/shareware program out there that will do it too.

Will any of the newer Adobe Acrobat programs do this? I only have the reader version and can't find much about it online.

why do u want to scan it into pdf? just do it straight to a jpeg and then use ocr to convert it to word...software should be with any scanner made in the last 10 years...

Thanks for the suggestion. I later found for myself that word could do this for me, but unfortunately my office scanner/copy machine/printer/computer thing won't let me scan into anything but a .pdf for some reason. I guess I should get this sorted out and that will answer my problem...