Office Lens - the only scanner you'll need

Have you ever been to one of these...



Any when you look around you, everyone is quickly taking pictures of the screens around you.

Or have you ever been at a presentation and quickly done this:

Welcome to Office Lens, an app for iOS, Windows 8, and Android phones.

Office Lens turns your phone into a document scanner, screen capture device and whiteboard scanner.

It's key features include:

• Integration with OneNote meaning you can capture material directly to your OneNote Notebooks.
• Integration with OneDrive allowing you to save captured material directly as PDF, Word or Powerpoint documents
• The ability to capture multiple pictures in a single session (e.g. the twenty slides of a presentation.
• The native ability to crop and clean up images

It is this last feature that makes Office Lens such a downright useful tool. If you are seated in the cheap seats like I did at EduTech a few years ago, you can use Office Lens to straighten the keystone effect in the image. Similarly, it will flatten the image, remove flash glare and other features common of pictures taking at conferences, presentations, and professional development days.

You can see below a recent picture I took on my phone on the fly (before). Then you can see how Office Lens processed this information (after).

Before	After

Of course, you can also do your own drawing on these images once they are in OneNote which makes annotating presentations a breeze!

And if, like me, you don't have a handy scanner at home, consider:

• Scanning your receipts for tax time or warranty purposes
• Keeping records of files and bills so that they are available in the cloud
• Keeping evidence of awards and certificates you've received

As you can imagine, this is a handy tool for both students and teachers. The best bit is, you don't have to even have the app handy at the time. You can take the pictures and then process them later.