Typing, Simplified

Office Lens can be a life-saver! I wish I had known this yesterday. My son wrote a paper for his college English class. Long story short, his computer crashed. Luckily, he had a paper version already printed out. Bad news – the professor wanted the digital version to turn in through Turnitin. So, he spent the evening re-typing his paper.

I stumbled upon Office Lens just this morning and wish I would have known then what I know now! On first appearance, Office Lens is similar to a scanner. But it does more than just scan – it actually converts the digital copy to a Word or PowerPoint document that can be edited with amazing accuracy!

To test it out, I took a picture of this page from The Power of Our Words by Paula Denton, EdD using Office Lens:

It then took this image and created a Word document, complete with formatting, that I could edit on my iPad or computer. (Don’t worry – I won’t edit this amazing book!)

Pretty awesome, right? You can even take a picture of a whiteboard and it will trim the edges, clean up the glare and shadows, then allow you to open it up in Word, PowerPoint, or save as a PDF to OneDrive.

There are many scanning apps out there, but the flattening effect of this one is great.