4 February 2021, 9:23 am EST By Microsoft Lens, a former Office 365 App called Office Lens, can now recognize your handwriting. ( Screenshot from YouTube/Matthew Hains )
Microsoft s previous Office 365 app, the Office Lens is now rebranded into Microsoft Lens. Not only the name of the app is changed, but Microsoft also upgraded its features, which just got better with the newest addition of handwriting recognition, besides its function as a scanner.
What s New with Microsoft Lens
Office Lens on its first launch in 2014 was already awe-inspiring since it was introduced to be a document scanning app. When you are dealing with school papers and other documents, there s no problem in choosing it. You can also edit the scanned documents in Word.
Microsoft Rebrands Office Lens, Releases Major Update Feb 4, 2021 14:46 GMT
Office Lens reinvented
Microsoft has officially announced a series of major changes for Office Lens, and the most notable is a rebranding of the app.
From now on, the app will be called Microsoft Lens, something that makes sense given the company’s rebranding of other products, including Microsoft 365.
But in addition to the app getting a more straightforward name, the Redmond-based software giant has also announced a major update in terms of capabilities aimed at mobile devices.
Android users are getting lots of new features with this release, and the first of them concerns more intelligent camera capabilities, including image to text, image to table, image to contact, immersive reader, and a QR code scan.
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Besides having a new look and name, Microsoft Lens now boasts a tonne of extra camera functions. Image to Table and Image to Contact scanning as well as a QR Code tool are among the new strings in Microsoft Lens s bow.
Microsoft Lens also now boasts an improved scanning experience that allows users to re-order pages or re-edit scanned PDFs. Filters can also be applied to all images in a document and Microsoft Lens can also can up to 100 pages as images or PDFs.
Users can also easily switch between local and cloud locations while saving PDF. Announcing the changes in a blog post, Microsoft said: We re taking the next step in our evolution by changing our name and logo from Office Lens to Microsoft Lens and adding some dynamic new features.
Picked by Techconnect s Editors
Microsoft’s Office app for Android and iOS is already one of the best mobile apps you don’t know about, able to reproduce the functionality of a scanner with superior OCR text recognition. Now, it’s getting even better: the Microsoft Lens portion of the app now promises it can read your handwriting.
Microsoft’s Office Lens has quietly existed within Microsoft’s stable of apps since 2014, when the company first debuted its capabilities of taking a picture of a page of text, scanning it, extracting the text, and formatting it for PowerPoint. In the six years since, Microsoft’s had ample time to add features, including document scanning, PDF conversion, PDF signing, and more. It’s a superb tool.
Office Lens is being renamed to Microsoft Lens. Along with the name change, Microsoft is rolling out several new features set to come out over the coming months.