The Application Development Experiences of an Enterprise Engineer

Office Lens–Magic in a Free App

Posted by bsstahl on 2015-09-30 and Filed Under: tools 


While I was working on my last post, I experimented with some visualizations that I thought might help make my point a bit more clearly.  I didn’t end up using them, but the whiteboard exercise that I went through in developing them helped me organize my thoughts, and, I believe, resulted in a better article.

After Office Lens Processing

Once I had drawn-out things the way I wanted them, I did what many people do with a whiteboard, I took a photo of it for my notes. The image above shows what resulted.  As you can see, it isn’t a bad rendering, although certainly not perfect.  The words and structure are both clearly visible and easily readable, but there is nothing all that impressive about it on its own. After all, there are a number of apps out there which can convert a photo of a whiteboard to a similar image. The part where it becomes interesting is when you see the original source photo, shown below.

Before Office Lens Processing

You see, I was working on the post from my hotel room, and my “whiteboard” was the hotel window.  Despite all of the background clutter, I didn’t have to do anything special to get the whiteboard image.  I just did what I always do, open Office Lens, select whiteboard, and take a picture. The app did the rest.  Not only that, but it also, once I saved it, automatically uploaded it to my OneNote so that, by the time I got back to my laptop, I already had a synced copy of it in OneNote ready to be dragged into the appropriate notebook.  Plus, since my phone is set to sync my photos to OneDrive, I already had a copy of both the original image, and the whiteboard image, in my OneDrive Camera Roll. All of this is configurable of course. If you want, Office Lens will just save the images to your phone. But for me, the OneNote integration is a huge time-saver.

Oh, and by the way, it can also function as a document and business card scanner. Magic!

Office Lens is a free app from Microsoft that is available on all major phone platforms.

Tags: onenote apps microsoft phone 

About the Author

Barry S. StahlBarry S. Stahl (he/him/his) - Barry is a .NET Software Engineer who has been creating business solutions for enterprise customers since the mid 1980s. Barry is also an Election Integrity Activist, baseball and hockey fan, husband of one genius and father of another, and a 40 year resident of Phoenix Arizona USA. When Barry is not traveling around the world to speak at Conferences, Code Camps and User Groups or to participate in GiveCamp events, he spends his days as a Solution Architect for Carvana in Tempe AZ and his nights thinking about the next AZGiveCamp event where software creators come together to build websites and apps for some great non-profit organizations.

For more information about Barry, see his About Me Page.

Barry has started delivering in-person talks again now that numerous mechanisms for protecting our communities from Covid-19 are available. He will, of course, still entertain opportunities to speak online. Please contact him if you would like him to deliver one of his talks at your event, either online or in-person. Refer to his Community Speaker page for available options.

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