Microsoft Office Lens is a free program for mobile devices (like your cell phone) that does many super useful task but the one I use the most is “straightening photos” on the fly.  For example, instead of using the stock camera app on my Samsung Galaxy S9 I used the Office Lens camera app and with litterally no work on my part it calculated the angle of the screen, that the screen was what I wanted and then straightened it.  Click on the image below:
Office Lens is will also scan business cards or documents and convert them to text (Optical Character Recognition – OCR) and even read them to you.  Click the image below:office-lens-straighten-ocr-edit

Note that Office Lens is integrated into OneNote mobile so if you are using OneNote on your cell, you already have Office Lens capability, but you can download it as a separate and amazing app if you want.

Office Lens will shortly be built into to all Office Mobile apps so you will be able to do things like add a an OCR’d business card into a Word Document all from your mobile phone.  Today this functionality is only built into Excel Mobile, meaning you can take a photo of an Excel table and “Excel” (really Office Lens in the background), will convert that photo to text, put it in Excel columns and rows so you can edit it.

For more details on Office Lens, see the official (but short) Microsoft page HERE.


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