defining OCR area

this is an excruciatingly newbie question for someone who has been using Acrobat for decades!

I have a scanned page that I want to OCR - I click on Edit PDF and it starts OCR staright away, but it's splitting the text into separate boxes - I want the whole page as one story (it has tabs so it "looks" like it's in columns, but it isn't)

How do I tell it to scan the whole page and not make assumptions about how the text should be split into "bounding boxes"?

Or failing that, how do I tell it to combine text boxes?

Thanks

Emily