Using Microsoft Office Lens to Scan Anything

Overview

Microsoft Office Lens turns your portable devices (iOS/Android) into portable, instant scanners.  This removes the need to setup complicated scanners, and allows you to carry one in your pocket.  Office Lens can be connected to save the scans/images directly to your phone, PDF, Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft OneNote, Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, and more.  Scans/images can be saved as PDF, JPG or PNG format.

Windows

  1. First, download Microsoft Office Lens from the appropriate App Store for your device.
  2. When you first launch Office Lens, it will ask for permission to access your camera.  You must allow permission to use the camera to use Lens.
  3. The default view is your camera.  At the bottom you will see the white "take picture" button, and be able to swipe left or right to choose the type of document you care capturing.  These include: Whiteboard, Document, Business Card or Photo.  This is important because this impacts the way Office Lens intelligently frames the image.
  4. Once you have selected the type of image, move your camera over your document, make sure the orange frame lines up as evenly as possible and press the white button.
  5. After a moment, the image will appear on screen.  Office Lens does not always do a great job of framing.  You can now crop the image as you see fit to get the best scan possible by moving the white circles to encompass your document.  Once you have it set, tap CONFIRM.  If you can't get it quite right, tap CANCAL and try the scanning process again.


     
  6. Once you've confirmed, Office Lens will ask you where you would like to save the scan.  Note, if you select OneDrive or OneNote, Lens will ask you to authenticate to Office 365 to access your Notebooks or OneDrive resources.  It will also ask you where in OneNote or OneDrive you would like to save the scan.


     
  7. Once you've done this, the scan will be uploaded or sent to the app you have chosen.  Unfortunately, if you have a multi-page document to scan, you will need to do this for each page.  It currently does not support multi-page scanning in one document.  
     
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