Microsoft has recently released Office Lens, your own document scanner application for Windows Phone 8 and 8.1. It’s like a full-fledged scanner that quietly fits in your pocket. Whether you are a student or a professional person, Office Lens will help you to manage your stacks of paper. If you are living with your old physical copies of documents till now, then the time has come to put down some of your baggage load from your shoulder by digitizing your papers.
Office Lens actually behaves like a scanner with your computer. It is one of the first apps to use new One-Note service API. Office Lens has image capturing capabilities for documents and whiteboard via automatic rotation, straightening, cropping, sharpening, and shadow removing. It is now free for download from windows phone store. It has already become a popular as a document scanner application which scans your hard copy of documents on the go. Let’s take a detailed look on this app.
After installation of Office Lens, on starting the app for first time a brief introduction will be given through three different screens.
Modes of Office Lens:
Office Lens has three modes. Namely, Photos, Whiteboard, and Document. You should pick one before taking pictures using this app. User can capture photos in different situations and from different angles. It causes disputes of the images. It may be over or under exposed, blurred, or may be suffered from glares of whiteboard’s smooth and reflecting surface. Office Lens automatically corrects the images by heightening the quality.
Take a picture using Office Lens:
Capturing a picture using Office Lens is as simple as just one click. Select your target, choose your mode and press the camera icon at the lower middle part of the screen. There is also an icon on the top of the screen to toggle between the flash on and off option. Once you have taken a picture, before saving, you can crop it by managing the boundaries. Office Lens has the ability to recognize the edges of an image. You also have options to take more pictures or drop the existing one on the same screen.
Save a picture:
When you will press on the save icon, a screen with page title for One-Note and number of pictures you have taken will appear. Office Lens generates a name of the page for you, which is a combination of current date followed by the time and “Office Lens”. You can change it just by tapping on the text box and typing a name in your mind. When ready press the done icon at the bottom.
You need to remember to sign-up with your Microsoft account before saving the picture and make any changes to its settings. The account must be the same as the one registered on your device from where you are using Office Lens. All the captured images save to your One-Note cloud storage as a new page. Your mobile version of One-Note will be synced within a while and you can see your new page under quick note. With this, all the images will be saved to the camera-roll of your windows phone. You can open each picture with office Lens later and make necessary changes.
Technology Used :
One-Note cloud storage uses OCR (Optical Character-Recognition) technology. If there is any text written in English in your captured image OCR turns it into editable and searchable text. OCR accuracy depends on the quality of the image being scanned.
Office Lens also incorporates some of the key image enhancement algorithms from AIE (Advanced Image Editor) to correct image tone, exposure, improve contrast, color quality and reduces “noise”.
At long last, we can conclude that Office Lens saves time and changes the way one can archive our important documents and notes. You are not going to miss a single bit of your information with the Office Lens. It’s perfect for brainstorming and note making. It was really a big challenge for Office Lens developers and researchers and they made it.
This is the age of new technologies and digitization. When most of us are starting to get used in here, many of us are still struggling to keep pace with this digital revolution. Embrace. Be the change.