If you are one of those people who are fed up with having to use the computer to manage digital documents, spreadsheets and PDFs, know that Microsoft’s Office app for iOS and Android phones offers the ability to work from home. the old one.
This way, kids can work the old-fashioned way in paper format, then scan the document with your mobile and send the work to their teacher.
Microsoft has released its application Office for iOS and Android earlier this year, and many people tapped its potential to handle documents at home during the pandemic.
And the fact is that the tools included under the aegis of the Office make it possible to manage the daily tasks of documents for adults and minors, saving time in processes such as capturing information, correcting text or editing. digital signature of the document.
Below, we’ve put together a series of quick tutorials on how to make things easier with Office. You can convert a photo to PDF, sign an already created PDF, capture a page from a book and extract the text with OCR mode, and much more.
Unlike the rest of PDF document editing programs They are generally paid, the functions offered by the Office application for your mobile are completely free.
How to scan your children’s homework
There are countless ways to scan documents to store them on your mobile and share them. The way we suggest here is based on using the Office application. If you have an Android mobile, go to the “Actions” icon at the bottom of the screen.
You will see a full list of cool menu items. Click on the ‘Scan to PDF’ option. This will take you to a pretty classic photo capture screen with some cool options.
By default, “Document” is highlighted. If you place your child’s worksheet on the table, you will see a small ghost rectangle surrounding it. The result of the application of AI, to detect the edges of the document and align them so that your PDF appears crisp.
In other words, don’t waste too much time trying to line up the edges of the sheet, because the app will take care of that for you.
Choosing the “chalkboard” option will allow you to capture the photo of a piece of art hanging on the wall and again, Office will frame it perfectly. Office allows you to adjust the frames as desired and save the file as PDF to access it from the main screen.
Office has the option to convert an existing photo (stored in your camera’s photo album) to PDF, but it only converts the image to PDF without applying AI cropping. It’s easier to take a new photo if you have the original document in front of you.
How to sign a PDF from your mobile phone
If it turns out that you need to sign a document that you need to send back to the teacher or someone else electronically, the Office app makes it easy for you as well.
Do you have a printed document? Please use “Scan to PDF” function above to convert it to PDF document.
Do you have an electronic document, such as a Word or Google Docs file? If this is a Google Docs file, save it in Word format. These files can be opened with the PDF converter tool, which is part of the Office mobile app you are using.
Once you have a PDF of your file, you should see the option “Sign PDF” in the “Actions” heading, under the “Do more with PDF” subheading.
The app will open your PDF and select a location to add the signature. Don’t worry about the location if it’s not correct. Once clicked, a different window will open where you can add your signature.
Once you have returned your signature, the PDF will reopen with a gigantic overlay of your overlaid signature. Pinch or enlarge the signature to make it smaller or smaller to fit the space you want, then save the PDF.
How to send a PDF from the Office app
The main screen of the Office application allows you to share a document by text or email, including PDFs you just created. If you need to move the file from your computer to another location, you should use the “Transfer Files” option.
The “transfer files” option at the top of the “Actions” page will direct you to transfer.office.com, a website where you will be asked to scan a code with your phone to authenticate yourself.
Since it’s web-based, you should be able to transfer the PDF whether the laptop is a Chromebook or a Windows PC.
On your phone, you need to select “Send or Receive” to make sure the file is going in the right direction. Find the file in ‘File Explorer’ and save it where it should be.
How to use your phone as OCR to scan text
There’s another hugely cool trick that kids working with a printed textbook and needing to capture notes can benefit from – it does so by turning your phone into an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) device.
We don’t scan a page like a scanner would, but we read and copy the text on the page.
To start the process, you need to go back to the “Actions” page and select the “Image to Text” option. It will work with both a photo and a stored image.
Office does this very well, although you’ll always want to fix it. You will get the best results if the page is flat and well-lit.
As you may have seen, the tools Office includes for Android and iOS users are a handy way to save time and effort on tasks that we repeat very frequently. Put them into practice and save time!
Content was prepared by Mark Hachman and published in PCWorld USA.
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