Office Lens for Android finally has a much desired feature; the ability to take many photos and save them to a single document. As usual, there’s a little ‘gotcha’ that makes the new feature incomplete.
Office Lens is a nifty app for iPhone and Android devices that takes photos, especially of documents, receipts, whiteboards etc. It lets you crop and reorient the image to make it easier to read. Microsoft also boasts that Lens has ‘Image to Text’ or OCR support but that’s really part of OneNote, not Lens itself.
The Android version is free from Google Play .
Until now, Office Lens could only handle a single image. You had to save each image to a separate OneNote or Word page, PowerPoint presentation or PDF.
Now it’s possible to take many photos and save to a single document.
Many images in one document
The addition to Lens is a + icon below a taken photo. Click on that button to take another photo in the same group.
The 1/1 will update 2/2 etc as you take more shots.
The top left has Delete and Adjust image tools plus the menu to choose the type of object being photographed: Document, Photo, Whiteboard or Business Card.
When you’ve finished taking photos, click Save then choose where you’d like the image/s saved.
Multiple images can be saved to OneNote, Word, PowerPoint or PDF. Separate images are saved to the OneDrive and Gallery options.
Import images
It’s possible to import an existing image into Office Lens. Do that from the opening screen under the menu at top right.
This is often necessary because photos are taken with the default camera app (which is easily accessible) and not directly by Lens.
Sadly, this Import option isn’t properly positioned in the Office Lens workflow. Multiple image support shows up that shortcoming.
Lens can’t import multiple images into a single document. It can import the first image only and combine that with newly taken images.
