Annotation and editing features: Once you have a nice, clean scan, you might want to mark it up-place some Xs so your client knows where to sign, for instance, or highlight text, add notes, or even put your own signature on a contract.At a bare minimum, we looked for a promise that apps won’t sell or share your data without consent. Attention to security: We were skeptical of apps that encourage you (or require you) to upload your scans to their own cloud servers for storage and OCR, as well as those that don’t provide clear security and privacy policies.
If the app can automatically back up scans to cloud storage, all the better. Ample sharing options: A good scanning app provides a convenient way to share your scans and OCR results on all the channels you like to use-email, Dropbox, Google Drive, Slack, printers, faxes, and more.Some apps export raw text (either as a TXT file or copied to the clipboard), while others provide formatted text in RTF or DOC files. Accurate text recognition: The best scanning apps use optical character recognition (OCR) to locate text in an image and convert it to an editable document.Different apps provide different scan resolutions and different filters, some of which are better than others at smoothing out wrinkles, shadows, and other blemishes. Great image quality: Although the scan quality is partly dependent on the quality of your phone camera, it also has a lot to do with the app itself.We looked for apps with intuitive controls, a thoughtful layout, and helpful features such as automatic document recognition and capture. Ease of use: Above all else, scanning apps have to be easy to use, or else you won’t want to use them.This will allow you to easily find and view the documents across all of your devices. The pictures that are taken through Office Lens can be saved not only to your camera roll, but also to Microsoft's OneNote as well. Making digital copies of important documents is a useful backup option, with the added ability to make changes and even search through text. Some example scenarios would include the capture of presentations to then share information with co-workers, taking a capture of a menu or even saving itinerary notes. Additionally, Document mode will trim and color your documents to make it easier to extract the text. For example, Whiteboard mode allows Office Lens to trim and clean up the glares and shadows that the rather reflective white surface will provide. Understanding that not all situations will provide ideal light, or the most photogenic of subjects, Microsoft has built in a few extra features for those scenarios. With this, you can take pictures of presentations, documents, receipts, business cards and much more, then have the app turn it into text which you can then search through.īy utilizing Optical character recognition (OCR) the app is able to take the pictures and decipher them. Office Lens is an application which Microsoft developed that lets you scan a wide variety of text from different documents and it then converts them into searchable electronic files.