What is it
With the growth in smartphones and tablets with their ever faster and more powerful processors, tasks that would have typically required multiple steps and access to specialist hardware and software can now be done by making use of an app.
That's where Microsoft Office lens comes in it enables the user to photograph, a document, white board or business card, crop it, rotate it and annotate it and make the text editable via a Word document, Power point or PDF.
How does it work
Having opened the app, one the left hand side you have a plus and a minus slider which you can use to zoom in and out, on the right hand side you have a button for taking the photo. You can choose what type of object you are photographing whether it be a document, a whiteboard a photograph or a Business card.
Having taken your photograph you can apply a filter by swiping the document up there is a choice auto, colour, B&W1 B&W2 and grayscale settings for you to choose from.
In the top left hand corner of the screen is the option to crop and rotate the object that you photographed you can also use a pencil tool to circle and add annotations, typed annotations can also be added. Once you finished editing press the done button in the bottom right-hand corner and you can choose where to save it, whether that be your photo library, as a PDF, OneNote, OneDrive, Word or PowerPoint.
When could you use it
I can see this app being really useful for students in enabling them to photograph class notes that have been made on a whiteboard during a lesson, or paper based notes that they have made which can them be converted to editable text.
Teachers could find it useful enabling them to photograph quotes or references that they want to refer to within their lectures or for capturing student work done during the lessons
The app is available for both Android and iOS devices For further information check out this infographic I have created
Other apps you may be interested in
If you like this app you may also be interested in looking at Google Keep as images captured in Google keep can be opened in Google Docs allowing you can make use of the built in OCR text recognition function, so that text becomes editable.
Here is my video guide: