If you’re like me, you undoubtedly have a wad of receipts wedged into your wallet, crammed in between rusty coins and numerous business cards that have solidified into one solid block. Trying to return an item back to a store is a nightmare since all your receipts are faded and trying to get a hold of your friendly contact at the store is impossible due to the block of business cards in your wallet that’s starting to turn green whilst giving of a smell of bad cheese.
As a result, this week’s App of the Week is something akin to a blessing. Office Lens is like having a scanner in your pocket. Like magic, it will digitize notes on whiteboards or blackboards, you’ll be able to always find important documents or business cards. While it was once originally only available on Windows Smartphones, it earlier made the jump to other mobile platforms earlier this year giving users the ability to take pictures of physical documents, digitise them and then use Microsoft’s suite of software to edit them; you can also save images as a simple Jpeg file.
I gave Office Lens a try and was pleasantly surprised by its capabilities; for instance I could actually take a picture of a business card from an obscene angle but Office Lens would clean it up and display it as if I had passed the business card through a scanner instead of taken a picture of it.
I was amazed, in fact, when I snapped a photo of a fairly complex document — with images, multiple columns and various sized headings — and it imported into Word in editable form. To be sure, the formatting wasn’t perfect. But it was plenty good enough that I could make simple changes to what moments before had been a piece of paper on my desk, and share it with co-workers.
The interface itself is quite clean and there are only a few things you really have to tinker with, the foremost being the option of what you’re scanning: Is it a document, a whiteboard or a normal photo. Other than that you can select what resolution you want the pictures to be at so that you can get crisper scans. When you aim the camera at a business card, a box automatically appears around the business card and you just snap a picture. Don’t worry if you find out that the Office Lens cropped out key parts of the business card, you can edit the picture and crop it to dimensions you yourself set. After that it’s a simple matter of either deleting the picture if you aren’t pleased with it, or saving it. When saving, you have a number of options, you can save it locally to your gallery as a Jpeg file, or save it to OneNote, OneDrive, as a Word document, a Powerpoint or a PDF. You’ll also have to give a title so you can easily find it again.
And that’s the gist of Office Lens. It’s a must have for its simplicity and for its incredible applicability in everyday tasks. You can download it from the Google Play Store here, the Apple App Store here and the Microsoft Store here.
