Office Lens

Information travels fast in an office environment. In fact, it sometimes travels so fast that you hardly even have time to store it. This isn’t about emails or memos or anything like that, but more about the information that isn’t digital, because, like it or not, we still write stuff down.

How many times have you taken a picture of a whiteboard during a meeting or of some notes on a white piece of paper, only to find out later that you can’t really understand the writing? Well, Office Lens is an application that aims to fix that.

When you take pictures of papers or whiteboards with your computer’s camera, Office Lens can automatically detect them. Thus, it will trim the picture accordingly, so you only get the part that you’re interested it.

However, the most useful feature is that it will try to make the picture as clear as possible using one of three filters: Document, White Board and Business Card. Choose one depending on what you photographed and see if the app manages to add some details to the scribbling.

While Office Lens shows its true power when you use it from a mobile phone, it can still be helpful as a desktop app. You can easily import the photos that you need to decipher and apply the filters directly to them. Just remember that the program isn’t magical, so if you took a photo with a low resolution camera, don’t expect it to create quality out of nothing.

You can consider Office Lens a personal scanner of sorts that can help you digitize handwritten text. Make sure you never lose any of those notes by saving the images to OneNote or OneDrive, as Word or PowerPoint documents or even as PDFs.