Guide: Office Lens vs Google Drive Scan: Comparison and Review
While Office Lens is quite a popular app to scan documents and store them in the cloud, few people are aware of Google Drive’s scanning capabilities. You can also scan documents with Google Drive and save them to the cloud. The premise remains the same. You open the scanner, align the printed document, make some changes and save. But how is Office Lens different from Google Drive Scan? First, Google built the scanner directly into Drive instead of going for a separate app. Let’s dive deeper and see which approach is better, and which scanner app you prefer over the other.
1. How to Scan
Since scanner is part of the Google Drive app, you will need to open Drive and click the ‘+’ icon to get started. There is a widget that you can place on the home screen.
On the downside it is camera starts automatically in Office Lens when you open the app. That is one click less and works much faster.
2. Scan options
This is where things start to differ significantly. Microsoft Office Lens takes a more professional approach and offers 4 different options namely Whiteboard, Document, Business Card and Photo. Choosing one will change its brightness and contrast settings to remove glare and make things more focused. Each is self-explanatory, giving the user more control over the scanning options.
Google Drive Scan also offers scanning options, but they are different. Photo, portrait, square and manual. Personally, I like Office Lens’s approach better: depending on the type of document I’m scanning, the app applies the settings automatically. Sounds more logical. For example, if you scan a whiteboard, there is a risk of glare. However, Office Lens handles it beautifully by removing shadows, glare and turning off the flash.
3. Multi-page scans
Office Lens automatically detects the edges. There is a bulk mode option at the top right to scan multiple pages at once.
Once you have it enabled, you can scan page after page without having to go back and forth between editing options. When you have finished scanning all pages, tap the round scan option on the right with a number indicating the number of scans completed.
Just tap the orange check mark to create a PDF file with all scans neatly organized page-by-page. You select the PDF option in the next screen.
Drive Scan was unable to identify the angles leading to unnecessary cropping. But there was an option to adjust it manually. Coming back to multi-page scanning, there is a ‘+’ icon to scan another page, but you have to tap it repeatedly to go back to scan mode.
Office Lens is a lot faster because once the bulk mode is selected, you can easily scan one page after another. Drive Scan also creates a PDF file like Office Lens, and both apps save each document on a new page.
4. Editing options
Scanning documents isn’t the only option available in Office Lens. When you have finished scanning, there are options to add text, annotate, rotate images and change the scan type.
They are very easy to use and work very well. Useful for highlighting important text or annotating important parts of the document.
Unfortunately, Google Drive Scan lacks all of these useful and much-needed featuresInstead, there are image enhancement features such as the ability to turn pages black and white or use color. Another thing I noticed is that every scan has a timestamp in Drive Scan. Fortunately, there is an option to remove the timestamp and device watermark in the settings.
Where Drive Scan has image enhancement options, Office Lens has resolution options. You can go from 2.1 million in 1920x1080p and all the way up to 12 million in 4000x3000p. All screenshots herein guide were taken on 3.1M option, so there’s quite a bit of room for improvement.
5. Sharing and OCR options
Needless to say, both Office Lens and Drive Scan prefer their own ecosystem over others. Office Lens can save scans to the Gallery, as a PDF file, to the OneNote note-taking app, as a Word and PowerPoint file, or to the cloud with OneDrive. All Microsoft Office apps.
Notice the Immersive Reader option? That’s pretty cool. You see, Office Lens comes with powerful OCR and text-to-speech capabilities, which means the app can read the scanned text for you. If you listen quickly, you can control both the volume and the speaking speed. It was 100% accurate in my testing which is almost magical!
Google Drive Scan simply creates a PDF file and uploads it to a Drive folder of your choice. You need an external PDF editor such as Xodo to edit or mark up the PDF file. Where Office Lens can directly save the scanned document in one or more Office 365 formats, you must manually open the saved file in the Google Docs or Sheets app. You can then edit the document. Again, there are more unnecessary steps involved. 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. So OCR works in Google Drive, but there is no text to speech feature
And the winner is …
Office Lens wins without a doubt. It is extremely easy and fast to use, comes with a robust set of editing options, detects a variety of documents such as maps, whiteboard and more with ease, and you can save it in a number of formats in various Office apps. Even if you don’t use Microsoft Office, there is always the Gallery and PDF option. Drive Scan seems like an afterthought built into Google Drive rather than a full-fledged scan app. Handy for quick and individual scans, but that’s how far it goes. Both are free and available on Android and iOS. The next up: Want more about Google Drive Scan and how it works with different apps? Click on the link below for more information.
Office Lens vs Google Drive Scan: Comparison and Review: benefits
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