Science App Review

Science App Review

Office Lens

Have you ever had the problem of having to re write your entire essay onto your computer? If you need to copy a document that you wrote on paper into digital format it can be a tedious process because without the app you would need to re write the whole document. So my solution to this problem relies on my app called “Office Lens” By Microsoft. This app allows you to take a quick snapshot of any physical piece of writing and turn it into a PDF format. It uses your smartphone camera to capture the borders of the page then takes a picture turning any readable words into computer font.

This program has many different applications. The science application for this app is if you were in a lab or somewhere that holds lots of written archives that are important you can take a quick picture of it and turn it into a document. For example, say you found an interesting like a document on Quantum Mechanics but you don’t have time to write it onto your computer, just whip out your phone and take a picture of it and it is yours forever. If you have messy writing you can take a quick picture of what you wrote and it makes the pictures a lot more vibrant and adds a stronger contrast to your writing. Another interesting feature that Office lens has is the ability to take picture of your document then review the text on the page, although this feature can be a bit buggy on harder to read pages. All that this means is that you have to have legible writing when you take a picture so that the apps system UI can read your writing. It has four different camera modes Business Card, Photo, Document and Whiteboard. Each of these modes changes the font, contrast and brightness of the image.

This app belongs to the Microsoft office folder alongside the other office 365 tools such as Word and PowerPoint. This means that Office lens works great with Office 365 because you can connect the phone to the Microsoft cloud and upload directly to your one drive account if you have one. If you don’t have an Office 365 account you can still use Office lens, there are many different ways to share and send your info.

When I tested the app I went to every corner of the system trying to find flaws and Pros in the system. What I found is that the layout is very easy to navigate. When you start up the app it springs right into action, it has little lag when it starts up which means that it is snappy and it literally only takes a few seconds to take the picture and process it. When you are trying to take a picture with the camera it has surprisingly fast focusing, it has very strong auto-focussing system which gives it the ability to adjust to the size of your page.

The app software is pretty small; it is 21.3 megabits. I thought that this was pretty small for a Microsoft app but this app surprisingly had a lot of abilities for the size. The benefit of having an app this size is that it takes up almost no storage on your device and it takes no time at all to download. This app uses no active ram which is another good feature because it wont use any of your phones background data like other apps.

In the end I think that this app has strong potential. It is a handy little app that can come in useful when you least expect it. I couldn’t really find any cons of flaws in the system. A little twitch that I did find though is that it takes a while to send your images via email. It seems like it tries to change it into a jpeg instead of your phones image format.

So in conclusion this is a very handy app to have with you at all times. It is not only good for the science applications but it is also a handy tool for anything that you need to use in your writing.