Useful for quick and casual scans but that’s how far it goes.īoth are free and available on Android and iOS.
Even if you are not using Microsoft Office, there is always the Gallery and PDF option.ĭrive Scan seems like an afterthought built into Google Drive rather than a full-fledged scanning app. It is extremely easy and quick to use, comes with a robust set of editing options, detects a variety of documents like cards, whiteboard and more with ease, and you can save it in a number of formats to different Office apps. So, OCR does work in Google Drive but there is no text to voice feature.
On the plus side, once the PDF file is saved to Google Drive, you can search for the printed text using Drive’s universal search. Where Office Lens can save the scanned document directly in one or more Office 365 formats, you have to open the saved file manually in Google Docs or Sheets app. You will need a third-party PDF editor like Xodo to edit or mark the PDF file. Google Drive Scan will simply create a PDF file and upload it to a Drive folder of your choice. It was 100% accurate during my tests which is almost magical! You can manage the volume as well as speaking rate, if you are a fast listener. You see, Office Lens comes with powerful OCR and text to voice capabilities which means the app can read out the scanned text for you. Notice the Immersive Reader option? That’s pretty cool. Office Lens can save scans to the Gallery, as a PDF file, to OneNote note-taking app, as Word and PowerPoint file or save it to the cloud using OneDrive. Needless to say, both Office Lens and Drive Scan prefer their own ecosystem over others. All screenshots in this guide were taken at 3.1M option, so there is quite a lot of room for improvement. You can go from 2.1M in 1920x1080p and all the way to 12M at 4000x3000p. Where Drive Scan has image enhancement options, Office Lens has resolution options. There is an option to remove timestamp and device watermark in the settings though, thankfully. Instead, there are image enhancement features like ability to turn pages black & white or use color.Īnother thing I noted is that every scan is timestamped in Drive Scan. Unfortunately, Google Drive Scan misses out on all these useful and much needed features. Useful for highlighting important text or annotating important parts of the document. They are very easy to use and work really well. Once you are done scanning, there are options to add text, annotate, rotate image, and change scan type. Scanning documents is not the only option available at your disposal in Office Lens. Drive Scan also creates a PDF file like Office Lens and, in both the apps, each document is saved in a new page. Office Lens is a lot faster because once bulk mode is selected, you can simply scan one page after another. Coming back to multipage scanning, there is a ‘+’ icon to scan another page, however, you have to tap on it repeatedly to go back to scanning mode. But there was an option to manually adjust it. You will select the PDF option in the next screen.ĭrive Scan failed to identify the corners leading to unnecessary cropping. Simply tap on the orange check mark option to create a PDF file with all the scans neatly organized page-wise. Once you are done scanning all the pages, tap on the circular scan option on the right with a number denoting the number of scans completed. Once you enable it, you can scan one page after another without having to go back and forth between editing options. There is a bulk mode option at the upper right to scan multiple pages at once. Office Lens detects the edges automatically. Office Lens handles it beautifully though by removing shadows, glare, and turning off flash. Makes more sense.įor example, when you are scanning a whiteboard, there are chances of glare. Personally, I find Office Lens’ approach better where depending on the type of document I am scanning, the app will apply settings automatically. Google Drive Scan also offers scanning options but they are different. Each self-explanatory, giving the user more control over scanning options. Choosing one will change brightness and contrast settings to remove glare and bring things into more focus.
Microsoft Office Lens takes a more professional approach and offers 4 different options, namely Whiteboard, Document, Business Card, and Photo. This is where things begin to differ significantly. That’s one less click and works much faster.
On the other hand, the camera will automatically launch in Office Lens when you open the app. There is a widget that you can place on the homescreen though.
Because scanner is part of Google Drive app, you will have to open Drive and click on the ‘+’ icon to begin.