Microsoft Lens: PDF Scanner 4+

This App is the camera App we have ALL always needed but couldn’t have known we did. We’ve probably all taken photos of important documents or photographs, articles, even the paused TV screen, and then cropped and cropped and tried to perfect (or correct) the images of. What a time waster! What frustration! Well, with a steady hand (which I struggle to have) you can make PERFECT photo images (like scans, but right from your phone, even from weird angles). You may sometimes need to get the area lighting correct, make sure you aren’t in the light, creating a shadow on your photo, etc. But you will LOVE LOVE this App! I have found, for some unknown (to me) reason, that MOST photos come out best by far of you always use the ‘Business Card’ setting. From no matter how far away. The TV, everything I’ve mentioned above all seem to like the ‘Business Card’ setting the best. Then, using your iPhone’s Photos App you can edit the lighting, after effects, coloring, contrast, sharpness, and whatever.

I use this App, Microsoft Lens ALL THE TIME!

This app is fantastic, but it has problems capturing recipes. A killer use case for this is taking pictures of recipes from books or magazines and dropping the captured text into OneNote. The version of Lens that I first used would frequently misread numbers. For example, if the recipe calls for “1/8 teaspoon salt” it might get read as “1/2 teaspoon salt” which, you can imagine, will ruin the recipe. I’ve learned to inspect all numbers in the ingredients and directions to make sure they are correctly captured. The latest update seems to have made progress at reducing these errors, but there’s another issue that hasn’t been fixed yet. The app will sometimes (but not always) read ingredient lists as two columns when they should be read as one column with tabs. For example, if the recipe says: “1 cup <tab> Flour <new line> 1/2 cup <tab> Sugar <new line> 2 cups <tab> Water” Lens will often read that as “1 cup 1/2 cup 2 cups Flour Sugar Water”. (Sorry, it looks like the app store review won’t let me use tabs or returns here.) It would be very nice if there was a way to tell Lens that the text should be read as one column, not two. Or maybe Lens should have some sort of AI to realize that the text is gibberish if read as two columns but makes more sense if read as one.

Cam Scanner was one of the first out but they want you to put the scans in their online database. Lens has the ability to put your scans almost anywhere. My biggest complaint is that on my iPhone 14 Pro, (I think all the Pro versions) It doesn’t focus correctly on small scans like business cards or receipts if you get close enough to fill the screen. You are left with three choices. Blurry image, lower resolution image because you need to pull back and not fill the screen, or take a picture with the regular iPhone camera and import it to crop and set the appropriate filters. I have chosen the latter, I’m reminded what a pain it is every time I use it. I love the fact that that you can store the images, particularly in OneDrive, which I believe is truly the best cloud storage. The problem is that even if you have one drive loaded on your phone and are fully logged in, you are required to log in again with your full password. It doesn’t remember the last 100 times you used it with the same OneDrive and the same password.😖 Again, a real pain. Otherwise the quality, functionality and ease of use are good. I was hoping Microsoft would fix the above mentioned issues, but so far no…. I’m hoping for a fix sooner verses later.