OCTOBER 2020 PCWorld 99nicer. Open the Office app on Android, and
navigate to the Actions icon at the bottom of
the screen.
You’ll see a whole list of interesting
menu items. Tap Scan To PDF, a somewhat
confusing name.
This will bring you to a pretty conventional
photo screen with some interesting options at
the bottom. By default, the Document option
is highlighted. If you place your child’s
worksheet on a table or bed, you’ll see a
small ghostly rectangle surrounding it. This is
the Office app’s AI magic at work: It will sense
the document’s borders and align them so
that your PDF will look nice and neat. In other
words, don’t spend a lot of time aligning the
document’s borders within the frame, as the
app will do it for you.
Choosing the Whiteboard option allows
you to take a photo of a piece of artwork that’s
hanging on the wall—and again, Office will
make it nice and neat. Office will save the file
as a PDF, and it will be accessible from the
main screen.
Office does have an option to turn an
existing photo (from your camera roll) into a
PDF, but all it does is turn the image into a
PDF, with none of the AI snipping that the app
otherwise offers. I find it’s simply more
effective to snap a new shot if the original
document is available.Here, you can see how the Office app has
extracted the artwork from the rest of the scene.The Office app may be hypersensitive to boxes
drawn on the page—it will sometimes think that a
box, such as the middle one, is the entirety of the
page. Note the “stacked photos” icon to the lower
left: You can use that to make a multipage PDF
using multiple images.