Office Lens

What is Office Lens?

Office Lens is a free scanning app that enables users to quickly convert a print document to accessible digital document. Office Lens can be used for other functional activities such as independently read your mail, accessing a print menu, scan your receipts and business cards.

Microsoft Office Lens scans documents, cards, and whiteboards with your iOS or Android phone, making them more readable, and in some cases editable.

Office Lens not only scans all your documents but can also convert the images to PowerPoint, Word and the ubiquitous PDF. The app has the capability to share images of whiteboards and blackboards.

After launching the app, smartphone and tablet users can take a picture of a document, whiteboard, business card, sticky note, handwritten note, or poster. It's easy to take photos because the app automatically crops the background. Users can also crop photos by using the app to create a new image, and then photos are saved on the camera roll or as a file, which can be renamed, converted, and exported to folders for use later on. 

Because images can be saved and shared in many forms, students who struggle with organization will need a game plan -- perhaps learning the ins and outs of tools like OneNote, PowerPoint, or Google Drive so that they can easily find their snapshots when they need them.  

Furthermore, when you are in the whiteboard mode, the app automatically adjusts the glare, lighting as well as shadows with the motive to capture the board clearly. With the business card mode feature, information on the card will be captured in Spanish, German and English, with some more languages in the coming days.

What do we like about Office Lens?

OneNote or OneDrive can be used to store those files. OCR (Optical Character Recognition), which recognises handwritten text, enables word searches and word copying for editing purposes. Email can also be used to distribute saved files.

What skills does it improve?

The new Office Lens app as well as the Microsoft 365 productivity apps that use the Lens technology, such as Teams, Outlook, and Office, include improvements that increase quality and speed.

What age is it appropriate for?

Office Lens is appropriate for all ages. 

Is Office Lens free?

Office Lens is easy to download on all Android and iOS devices. 

Is Office Lens easy to use?

Although the walkthrough tutorial provided when installing the tool is quite helpful, the tool itself is simple to use. The buttons have simple yet effective purposes. Office Lens helps a lot in scanning the file while maintaining the original features, which makes it easier to view the student-uploaded files clearly. The document quality is at the highest possible level for a phone.

How will users benefit?

There are four different scanning modes available in this app. There are modes, such as Whiteboard, that let you create a document by capturing an image of the whiteboard. The second option is the most popular Document mode, which enables users to transform their photographs into Doc images. The third one enables the scanning of business cards. The photo scanner is the fourth and last option, and it enables you to improve the quality. You can select the preferred image resolution using this app. Simply click the three dots in the upper right corner of the screen to access the menu, then click the resolution button to access the list of resolutions.

With buttons for shooting, flash, scanning, and an overflow three-dot menu that provides access to Settings, Import, Recent History, and Resolution, the programme opens in Camera mode. The programme creates a box around any text that it detects in a document when you point your phone at it. You can select between a document, whiteboard, or photo using the scanner icon.

Office Lens has auto crop capability that lets you manually crop the document. It automatically detects the document section and crops it appropriately. Because it promotes productivity and saves time, this function is quite useful.

What can Office Lens improve on?

First of all, this application has few editing possibilities. On the images you scanned, there ought to be more modifying options. The user interface is a little confusing. 

How much does it cost?

Office Lens is available free of cost to the users. 

Final thoughts

Microsoft appears prepared to incorporate the new lens services with some of its most well-liked current offerings, including Word, Excel, Teams, and others. Securing a position in the handheld scanner side would undoubtedly be helpful for Microsoft, especially because the majority of academic and official works have switched to the digital platform.