Ever wish you had a pocket scanner that could sharpen, crop, straighten, OCR text, and then convert it to PDF, Word, or PowerPoint? With Office Lens you’ve got it! Recently, I needed to do a quick scan of a signature page on my phone and save it in PDF format. Office Lens, which is a scanner app from Microsoft, worked like a charm. I picked the scan type, set the flash, snapped a picture, and saved it in PDF format to my personal OneDrive account. I could just as easily have saved into one of my many OneNote notebooks too.
Office Lens Uses:
- Digitize notes on whiteboards and blackboards
- Scan business cards, receipts or sticky notes
- Sketch out ideas and snap a picture for later
Office Lens really does make your snapshots more readable. I’ve been astounded at the ability of Office Lens to “clean up” images, especially from whiteboards. Take a look at the samples on this page and you’ll see what I mean. Better yet, try it out for yourself.
Scan Types and Features:
- Document – trims and colors images perfectly
- Whiteboard – trims and cleans up glare and shadows
- Photo – saves to your device’s camera roll or directly into OneNote or OneDrive
- Business Card – contact info is saved to OneNote and as a .VCF file to easily add to your contacts
Specifications:
- Office Lens is available for Windows 8/8.1/10, as well as both the iOS and Android platforms.
- By default, your snapshots are saved to either OneNote or OneDrive, so they are accessible from any of your devices.
- You will need a OneDrive account (5 GB free storage) to use Office Lens and save documents, but you may also save to your device’s photo gallery as images.
You mentioned that Office Lens really does make your snapshots more readable. I didn’t realize that they had apps that could do the same things as a copy machine. Do all scanner apps offer this technology?
I don’t know about all, but many of them do.