How To Use Microsoft Office Lens

What Is Microsoft Office Lens And How Does It Work?

Are you still hanging onto hard copy documents, receipts, sticky notes, and other physical documentation? With Microsoft Office Lens, you can use your smartphone to get rid of it all.

Invoices, business cards, receipts… the list of hard copy documents we still have to hang on to every day is a long one. While the information recorded on those documents may be important, the medium itself is inconvenient and error-prone.

It’s so easy to lose or damage a hard copy document, which is why many businesses opt to scan them and store them digitally. Unfortunately, when it comes to the documents you accumulate while on the go, at meetings or conferences or elsewhere, it’s not exactly convenient to try to get them scanned.

Until now – the new Microsoft Office Lens app is a “scanner in your pocket,” giving you the ability to scan real-world text and instantly convert it to a digital, convenient counterpart. Check out our latest video to learn all about it:

Microsoft Office Lens 101

Using Microsoft Lens comes down to four simple steps:

1. Capture: Using the Microsoft Office Lens app, you take a picture of the document, whiteboard, or other content (business card, receipt, etc.) you want to digitize.
2. Trim: Adjust the edges of the image to make sure the borders of the final image line up with that on the real-world counterpart.
3. Format: Select which format you want to save it as: PDF, Word document, or PowerPoint Presentation.
4. Store: Save it locally to your device, or directly to OneDrive or SharePoint.

3 Situations When You Should Use Microsoft Office Lens

• Editing Text: If you only have access to a hard copy document or image-based PDF, you can use Microsoft Office Lens to scan the text into an editable Microsoft Word document.
• Indexed Records: Whether it’s your receipts or your collection of business cards, you can save and search their text through Microsoft Office Lens.
• Whiteboard Content: Don’t lose all that work you and your team put on the whiteboard during your last brainstorming session – take a photo and save it through Microsoft Office Lens where you can edit and search recognized text at a later date.

Microsoft Office Lens is yet another example of how one simple app can save you a lot of time and effort in the long run. By integrating this app into your daily document management processes both inside and outside of the office, you can streamline what were once tedious and time-consuming tasks.

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Wil Buchanan