Transform Images into Editable Documents with MS Office Lens App

Sharing documents and meeting notes is easier than ever with Microsoft’s Office Lens app.  Lens is a mobile scanning tool that offers seamless integration with OneNote, Microsoft’s cloud-syncing notebook service, and Microsoft Office suite.

Increase Productivity at Work

• Use it to scan and upload all your notes, receipts, and documents
• Capture your meeting’s whiteboard so you don’t lose those action items
• Scan printed text or handwritten meeting notes to edit and share later with your team
• Quickly capture your business networking contacts by scanning business cards at meetings or conferences and saving them to your contact list
• Choose to save as PDF, Image, Word or PowerPoint formats into OneNote, OneDrive, or local device as location

Choose the Best Mode for Your Situation

With Microsft Lens you can snap a picture of a whiteboard, document, business card or electronic screen, and import an enhanced version picture into your OneNote file. The best part about the app is the text recognition feature, transforming your static image to an editable and searchable document.

• Photo – This is a good mode to use if you’re taking pictures of scenery or people.
• Document – Works great when there are small words and details on a page. Use it for things like posters, fliers, or restaurant menus.
• Whiteboard – Use this mode to capture notes. Microsoft Lens will adjust the image so the background of the whiteboard isn’t too bright making the words are easier to read.
• Business Card – This mode will help you extract contact information and save it into your phone’s contacts and into OneNote. This feature currently works best with business cards in English, German, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese.

The accuracy of Lens’ recognition capabilities is determined by the quality of the image, so Microsoft programmed the app to either automatically or manually adjust the borders of any document, so you can take pictures at various angles without sacrificing the quality of the finished product.  You can use your camera or upload an existing photo from your media library and save your scanned files as a Word document, PowerPoint or PDF.

Review and Edit Your Image

You can edit your image with cropping or captioning before you save it so it’s exactly the way you want it to be. The caption will be used as the alt text in OneNote and the file title on OneDrive. After you edit an image, tap Save at the bottom. If you take more than two images, Microsoft Lens will show all the images you took in the gallery.

Additional Microsoft Lens Features

Images saved as Word or PowerPoint files, or as PDFs will be in your Documents folder in OneDrive or OneDrive for Business, so they are accessible from any of your devices. Microsoft Lens doesn’t just import an image into a Word or PowerPoint file. The final Word and PowerPoint documents are real Office documents.

For Word, Office Lens recognizes the text, handwritten or printed, and the document layout. All of the text, formatting, and the layout in the Word document it creates is fully editable — just like you authored it at your desk.

For PowerPoint, all of the handwritten lines and strokes are transformed into PowerPoint drawing objects that can be recolored, resized, moved around, and edited. You can remove the background of drawings as well, which makes it easier to reuse the drawings in other presentations.

For PDFs, Office Lens extracts the text information. You can search the content in a file with the text and you can highlight or copy part of the page with your PDF reader app.

Microsoft Lens is available for free from the app store for both Android and iOS users. Office Lens is a great option for those who are fed up with traditional scanning processes or clunky scanning apps, as well as those seeking a better way to share whiteboard meeting notes with colleagues and clients alike.

Important Updates From Microsoft:

• Certain cloud-based services in Office Lens for Windows, such as saving your pictures to OneDrive, OneNote, Word, PowerPoint, or PDF, are no longer available in the app as of December 31, 2020. You can continue to use any other features of the app as installed on your computer or device.
• Office Lens for Windows 10 is no longer available for download from the Microsoft Store as of January 1, 2021. To continue to enjoy all Office Lens features, we recommend downloading and using the latest version of Microsoft Lens for iOS or Microsoft Lens for Android on your mobile device.