PC World - USA (2020-10)

98 PCWorld OCTOBER 2020

HERE’S HOW HOW OFFICE APPS HELP WITH HOMEWORK

Here, you’ll find a few quick tutorials on

how to get things done with the Office app.

But it’s amazing how much it can actually do!

You can take a picture of a page of a book

and use the Office app to extract the text

automatically using optical character

recognition. You can turn a photo into a PDF.

You can sign a PDF that you’ve already

created. You can take a photo of a

spreadsheet and turn that into an Excel table,

or turn a document into a PDF, or vice versa.

Don’t underestimate those last features,

either, as PDF-to-Word conversion tools can

be hard to come by. And, of course, unlike

Microsoft’s Office app for Android stores a list

of your frequently-accessed Office documents,

but its list of powerful tools are hidden within the

Actions menu.

most of the PDF editors we’ve reviewed (go.

pcworld.com/pdrv), all these Office app

functions are free.

USE THE OFFICE APP

TO SCAN IN YOUR KIDS’

HOMEWORK

Your child’s teacher has probably already told

you one way of entering hand-drawn work:

using the camera on the PC or Chromebook.

At our school, the students are asked to open

their Google Doc, navigate to the Insert

Image icon on the toolbar, and snap a photo

from the user-facing camera. It’s easy,

effective, but not always that clear.

If you’d like, you can use the mobile Office

app to do the same thing, and it will look

The Office app’s Actions menu.