Abstract: Optical Character Recognition is still prevailing even after many decades of implementation. The challenges faced here are increasing day by day so as its applications. From Punched cards to Handwritten Text, from images to video, from uniform font to universal font, from English text to Global language, from researchers to visually handicapped are the transformations obtained from an era of the 1980s to 2010. This study has covered the advancement of acknowledging the characters, how are features are extracted, various methodologies used and more importantly what is the use of OCR.