Office Lens Review

posted April 7, 2021, by Andrew Biedron

During COVID, there have been a lot of changes around how school works. We’re only in half the time, the schedule is completely different, and one of the biggest things is that we’re pretty much not allowed to use paper anymore. In most cases, having to be completely digital isn’t that much of an issue. Classes just used Google Docs for writing, Google Sheets for tables and graphs, Google Classroom to turn everything in, and other digital programs to get school work done. But in the case of my AP physics class, being completely digital was significantly harder.

Like almost every class, we had to take quizzes and tests, which our teacher would post digitally on Google Classroom. However, physics is significantly easier to do on paper than on anything else, so we all wrote out the problems by hand. When we finished, though, since none of our work was already digital, we had no immediate way to turn it back in to be graded.

Initially, everyone just came up with their own solution to this issue and found a way to attach it to the Classroom assignment and turn it in that way. It became an issue for our teacher though because most people just ended up taking a picture of their work with their phone. Smartphones nowadays have such high quality cameras that the file sizes were absolutely enormous, and some also take pictures in a file format that computers can’t open. Therefore, our teacher had a really hard time grading our quizzes and tests. He found a solution to this problem with Office Lens.

Office Lens is a free mobile app for your phone that is meant to enhance the way your phone takes pictures, especially of paper. It has 5 settings: document, business card, whiteboard, actions, and photo. I’ve only used the document setting because that’s what works best for my physics situation, but even just that part of the app is a really good piece of software.

When taking a picture, the app attempts to automatically recognize the borders of the document you’re trying to take a picture of and shows you what it thinks on the screen. Once you do take your picture, you can drag and edit the borders of your image until they’re where you want them. I usually have to do this a little because the automatic ones are rarely perfect, but it’s always close. After you do that, you confirm your picture, and then the app automatically edits it to look flat (like you took the picture from right above the paper) as well as brighter and more contrasted so you can see what’s written more easily. You can also manually edit your photo by putting filters on it, rotating it, and writing and typing on it. What results is a bright, clear, and high quality photo of your paper.

Office Lens also allows you to handle your pictures in various ways. You can obviously just download the pictures as photos to your phone’s camera roll, but my teacher recommended Office Lens so that we could avoid doing that. What we found helpful was the app’s PDF capabilities. It allows you to store the photos you take in Office Lens as PDFs, and then share and upload them to other apps like Google Drive and Classroom just like you can with a normal photo. When you take multiple pictures, it strings them together as if it’s one file, too, which makes the upload process very easy. As a Microsoft developed app, you can also upload the photos to their other apps like OneNote, OneDrive, Word, and PowerPoint as well as any other compatible apps on your phone.

Office Lens has made my life significantly easier with all of its amazing abilities. That’s not to say that it’s the best app out there; if you’re willing to pay, there’s most likely something with even more capabilities. But for the purposes mentioned above, I think that Office Lens could honestly be a paid app with how good it is, and I don’t see how you’d need much more from it.