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#WHAT IS OFFICE LENS FREE#
‘Image to Text’ requires OneNote, but that’s now free to all comers. The enhanced ‘crop’ feature alone makes it worth having available.
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Office Lens has some handy features and is worth space on your smartphone, mostly for photos of documents, receipts and other text sources. Still, you can copy that text and rearrange it to recreate the original document or simply edit the ‘Alt Text’ so that future searches will be more accurate.
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Scrolling down we see that much of the text has been converted but not in a useable order. In the above example, you can see that there’s no columns in the converted text. OneNote converted text is has the prefix ‘Machine generated alternative text:’ as in this example.Īs always, the quality of the OCR depends on a lot of factors. You can see the text created by right clicking on an image in OneNote desktop and choosing ‘Alt Text’. It does this ‘behind the scenes’ and is mainly to make text in an image searchable, just like typed text on an OneNote page. Office Lens does not convert an image to text – that’s what OneNote does.įor a long time, OneNote has been able to convert an image into text. Microsoft loves to hype about the ‘image to text’ feature of Office Lens but that’s really a little marketing trick. You have to save the image to the Gallery or maybe a PDF, then send via email from there. There’s no direct email option for the image, which is a strange omission.
#WHAT IS OFFICE LENS PDF#
Word, PowerPoint, PDF – the image is inserted into a new document. This will trigger any app with a ‘Camera Roll/Upload’ feature to copy automatically images saved to the Gallery, for example DropBox or BT Sync. Gallery – saves a JPG to the default folder for camera images. OneDrive – saves a JPG image to the OneDrive Camera Roll, just like any other image taken on a device with Camera Roll on for the OneDrive app. Saving to OneNote is important because that’s where the OCR or ‘image to text’ happens. That will then synchronize with OneDrive and to your other devices with OneNote. OneNote – inserts the image as a new page into your OneNote notebooks. The default save locations are OneNote, OneDrive and the Gallery on the device itself. The above example is from Office Lens for Android. Click on the Crop button and select the relevant part of the image (not necessarily a square or rectangle) then click the ‘tick’ button. Microsoft demos are one thing, we thought we’d try it ourselves with a crumpled receipt taken at an odd angle.
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After going through the Lens cropping, you can see the whiteboard ‘front on’ which is easier for humans and OneNote to read. Microsoft’s example is a whiteboard image taken from the side. You can crop and straighten the image in ways that aren’t normally available. If that’s all Lens did, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Lens can take a photo of a document, receipt, whiteboard or anything else and lets you save it to OneNote, OneDrive and other Microsoft options. The OneNote option is important because OneNote is what provides some of the features hyped in Lens, most importantly Optical Character Recognition. Lens is a slick way to take a photo on your device and insert it into various Microsoft Office apps, especially OneNote.
#WHAT IS OFFICE LENS ANDROID#
It’s available for Apple iPhone, iPad and Android devices. Lens has a wonderful straightening trick that turns an off-center photo into something ‘straight on’ which is easier to read and convert into text. If you want to convert photos into a Word document (as text) or PDF, the Office Lens is the way to go. Office Lens is a good app for iPhone, iPad and Android devices.