From Business Card to Outlook Contact using OneNote

I wrote a blog post about Office lens earlier. You can find it here. This time Office Lens will be the topic again but I will show you what an update can do for you. Note: business card credentials have been blurred for privacy reasons…

From Business Card to Office Lens to OneNote to Outlook Contacts
Wow that seems like a long way but actually the process is quit simple. I will show you the steps how to get your paper business cards into you Outlook contacts.

Step 1: Get the Office Lens app (windows store) it’s free (we all like free don’t we?)
Step 2: After you have installed the app take the paper business card and make a picture of it using your phone and the Office Lens app. Start Office Lens and in the settings menu choose business card. Don’t worry if the ‘focus square’ is a bit of. Office Lens will take care of that. Let me show you.

As you can see, a picture has been taken using my phone. Now Office Lens makes this of it:

Wow impressive, almost all of my table has been cropped! Next step is to save this picture on my phone. Office Lens has various choices for you here but I have chosen OneNote as the output channel. This will produce a page in your Personal Web OneNote book (this is the default setting). Ok let’s view how that looks…

 Ok, we see three sections here:
The first section shows the actual information extracted from the business card. It has done a great job. It recognized the name, the function and the phone and fax numbers. Furthermore it recognized the email address. And yes: do tell them if they did a good job.

The second section shows an icon which looks exactly like the Outlook contact card. Let’s perform a double-click action on that:

We get notified that this might be a harmful exercise. In this case I know what OneNote is trying to do so I click OK. Now here’s the surprising part: A new Outlook contact card is opened. All I have to do is check if everything has transferred ok and click Save.

Company name is empty so I add that and I am good to go.

The third part in OneNote shows the actual output from Office Lens. So in this case OneNote is the actual storage place for all your business cards. I can have them stored in my Outlook via the .VCF card or just keep them as a single entry in my OneNote book.

A triad of functionality in your hands.
Now here’s your homework assignment. Take a business card. Take out your phone and see if you can add this business card to your outlook contacts by just using your phone!