#UPTechTip: Office Lens is Your Pocket Scanner

If you use the cloud to store data, share, and collaborate, you may struggle with keeping track of information that’s only available offline. Printed information that’s handed out at meetings notes you jot down in a paper notebook or on a whiteboard – that information is so easily lost track of. Wouldn’t be nice if you could access and work with this data the same way you do information you’ve put into an online doc, spreadsheet, or OneNote?

Well, you can! The key is to find a good pocket scanner app for your mobile device.My favorite is Office Lens, which does a brilliant job of capturing information and integrating with your OneDrive or OneNote.

Here is one example scenario:

a whiteboard with text written in black marker. we are viewing from an off angle. the text readings "Podcasting: 1) Recordings, 2) Produce - Audacity - Garageband, 3) Publish - iTunes — Scenario: I want to capture some whiteboard notes after a meeting.

using the Office Lens app to capture the text on the whiteboard — I pull out my phone and start the Office Lens app to capture the whiteboard. Note I am standing at an off-angle – I don’t need to get a head-on picture.

In the Office Lens app, image on the board is cropped to include only the text — I can crop the image so I only get the part of the board I’m interested in.

black text on a white background reads the text readings "Podcasting: 1) Recordings, 2) Produce - Audacity - Garageband, 3) Publish - iTunes — The app uses advanced processing to straighten and clean up the image.

An i O S share sheet with the options to choose OneNote, OneDrive, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Immersive Reader, PDF, Mail or Photo ibrary — I can choose to save or share my notes in a variety of ways

i O S shareing option. a OnenOte notebook called "Ben@Work" is selected. — I choose to save to OneNote. I can pick which Notebook and section I want to save to.

Now the whiteboard data is in my OneNote. I can access it on the web, PC, Mac, and mobile devices. The text will even be scanned using Optical Character Recognition, becoming searchable so I can easily find it later.

You can download Office Lens on any of your mobile devices for free and sign in with your UP Office 365 account to link it to your UP OneDrive storage and OneNote notebooks.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply