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How to scan a document into Google Docs

Need to add scanned documents for work? We've got you covered!

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Google Docs features tools that let you write, edit, and format text documents. All you need is a Google account and a web browser. You can also collaborate with other users in real time. The word processor features an ever-growing list of add-ons for your needs. The cherry on top is that it works on most platforms, whether you use an Android phone, Windows desktop, or one of the best Chromebooks.

Snapchat's got some goofy new AR features for you to try

I can finally scan all the weeds in my front yard, but do I want to?

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Despite the popularity of competitors like Instagram, Snapchat's still an insanely popular messaging app. Hell, it even managed to hit one billion installs on Android before Google Messages. That doesn't mean Snap Inc. has stayed confined to developing its smartphone. Experiments like AR glasses and original programming have pushed Snapchat far beyond its original concept. With a newly-reworked iteration of Scan, the company's looking to bring AR search results to its massive fanbase.

Google is adding a document scanner to the Chrome OS Camera app

Don't have a scanner at home? Use your Chromebook

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The demand for flatbed scanners has been soaring ever since many of us started working from home because of the global pandemic. If you don't have access to that kind of hardware, being asked to sign and send a document might seem like an impossible task. Thankfully, the Chromebook you're using right now could soon double as a scanner.

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Text-recognition superpowers are coming soon to the Chrome OS scan app

You'll also be able to create multiple pages in a scan

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It's been over a year since the pandemic brought students and employees across the globe home to work online. The demand for flatbed scanners and printers have soared, and thanks to Chrome OS 89, its new scanner app makes digitizing your paper documents in a snap. It seems Google is looking for ways to make its scanning app more powerful, as it's adding two new features that should sway you away from your messy filing cabinet.

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Chrome OS 90 is here with a few handy new features

New Diagnostics app, Live Caption, and more

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A week following Chrome 90's release for desktop and mobile platforms, Chrome OS 90 is now arriving on eligible Chromebooks. Although Google didn't stuff quite as many features into it like OS 89, the update still improves Chromebooks with several changes to enhance the user experience. Here are all the important Chrome OS 90 features Google announced today.

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Google will soon bring a native document scanning app to Chrome OS

Easily digitalize your papers on your Chromebook with the click of a button

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The demand for flatbed scanners and printers has never been higher since the global pandemic brought students and employees home. Although document scanning on a PC operating system is easy thanks to broad software support from manufacturers, Chromebook owners have had to rely on workarounds to digitize their papers on Chrome OS. With the release of the native print jobs app on OS 86, it looks like Google is close to bringing a native scan tool to everyone.

There are a number of useful scanning apps on the Play Store that allow you to take photos of documents and turn them into digital copies. In fact, I wonder if proper scanners are even still sold anymore, such is the ease with which their purpose can now be fulfilled by a smartphone. Adobe Scan is one of the most popular examples of such an app, and its latest update makes it more powerful than ever.

There is no shortage of document scanning apps on the Play Store, including Google Drive, Dropbox, and Microsoft Lens. But if you aren't happy with those options, or if you frequently use Adobe Document Cloud, then Adobe's new scanning app might be worth trying out.

Evernote is a place for storing notes, and not just the ones you've typed up. You're welcome to scan documents and upload them to the service. Alternatively, you can whip out your phone, open the app, and take a picture.

Optical character recognition, also known as OCR, is really an amazing technology. If you aren't familiar, it takes images and reads the text on them. For PDFs, it can make the words it finds searchable, selectable, and whatever else you may want to do with them. The better implementations of OCR work well enough that they pretty much make CAPTCHAs pointless. And while Google Drive has offered this function in English for over a year now, it is now rolling it out to over 200 different languages.

Remember Flow, Amazon's augmented reality shopping aid that kinda sorta worked? Well now you don't have to, because the functionality has been rolled into the main Amazon shopping app. Now you can scan barcodes and even full products (at least some of the time) to compare their prices to everyone's favorite online megamart. And incidentally, you don't need a second app to do it.

Heads up, Google Wallet fans: better support for loyalty cards is coming to a Play Store update near you. According to a Google+ update from the Wallet team earlier today, the app will soon be able to auto-populate information when scanning in loyalty cards, presumably including the name and merchant. The update should be coming later this week, at least for the first batch of users. There are also some user interface changes, including a modified slide-out menu.

There are a lot of security apps for Android that go a little ways into overkill territory. Whether you're talking about superfluous task managers or "virus scanners" that may provide some minimal protection while generating more fear than is warranted, Android has a persistent problem with companies applying a Windows-era mentality on a completely different OS. Secunia PSI, however, takes the cake for being one of the least effective apps on the Play Store.

Slice, The Amazing Package Tracking App, Gets Updated To 2.0, Supports Outgoing Package Tracking, New Email Services, And More

When we first discovered Slice, the app that scans your email for packages that you're waiting to be delivered, has updated to version 2.0 and brought

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When we first discovered Slice, the app that scans your email for packages that you're waiting to be delivered, has updated to version 2.0 and brought a host of new features with it. For starters, if you use Hotmail, AOL, or iCloud as your primary email, you can now join in the fun. You can track outgoing packages by scanning tracking barcodes as well or entering the number manually, and filtering options have been improved.

Flow Is An Amazon-Powered Augmented Reality Product Search App That's Not Really As Cool As It Sounds

Amazon-owned development house A9 Innovations has released a product search app built on the idea that instead of tapping buttons to take pictures of products,

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Amazon-owned development house A9 Innovations has released a product search app built on the idea that instead of tapping buttons to take pictures of products, you'd rather just point your camera at products. Probably not a bad notion! Not exactly the most important thing to spend a bunch of money and time developing, but hey, if you can just wave your phone in front of a movie and get pricing and review information, it's gotta be worth it, right?

 

ShoeBox, an app that represents 1000memories' first foray into the Play Store, is an awesome digital photo organizer, "turning your Android device into a mobile photo scanner," and allowing for sophisticated organization, storage, and sharing of your treasured paper photos.

How's this for amazing? You see a piece of sheet music, but you can't read it because you're a plebian, or perhaps you can read it but you want to hear it. SnapNPlay is an app that lets you take a picture of a line of sheet music and then plays back the notes on the page. This is amazing.

In the never-ending move to digitize and mobilize your entire world, some areas (like banking) are slower than others (like email). When the old guard does update, though, usually we get something pretty cool. Rite Aid is the latest entry to join in the mobile world and it's bringing with it yet another piece of the future: scanning pill bottles to refill your prescriptions.

We don't tend to associate words like "scanning," "PDFs" and "documents" with fun. After playing with Handy Scanner, though... well, we still don't. Sorry. That headline was a lie. Scanning documents is, however, a breeze with this freemium app. Breezy enough that you won't want to go Office Space on your scanner, and that's fun.

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