What is Office Lens & how do you use it?

by Maria William Software Developer

Microsoft Office Lens is a built-in camera that was previously available only for OneNote for iPad or iPhone but is now for other Office.com/setup apps like OneDrive, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. The lens feature enables you to capture pictures of whiteboards or written documents and help you to enhance the files or photo by employing multiple features. Users can crop, sharpen and straighten the media or printed file, so to give it an appearance of a scanned file. Your picture is added to the notes in your Office OneNote account so you can recover it later whenever you need it.

To understand the right way of using it, follow the steps below. Please note that the steps below are applicable to Microsoft Office OneNote for iOS.

How do you use Microsoft Office lens?

Tap OneNote icon and login to your account associated with Office setup

Go to Office.com/setup to create an account if you do not have one

Create a new note or open an existing one, now open the note in which you want to put in a picture
Depending on your iOS device, do the following

Users with iPad- Tap Insert option and when the options appear select Camera
Users with iPhone- Tap the Camera icon on the ribbon above the keypad

You will see the different picture taking mode: WHITEBOARD, PHOTO, and DOCUMENT, select a mode and click a picture
The Office Lens app will sense the image and automatically crop the picture you took, but you can change the cropped image by dragging the circles on each corner to change the crop
When you are finished tap the check mark to save the changes and Office Lens will add the photo to your note

You have now captured an image and cropped it by edges. This feature will help you take images and files as if they are scanned. However, if you want to go back to the built-in iOS Camera app, you simply need to make a few setting changes. Go to Settings > OneNote > Camera Setting, and tap on the button to turn off Use Office Lens. In case of any trouble, seek help from Office com setup and find the fix.