Blog Post

Microsoft OneDrive Blog
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Multi-page scanning for everyone

Paul_Diamond's avatar
Paul_Diamond
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
May 13, 2020

With so many people now working from home, few of us have access to office equipment like printers and scanners. Scanning documents from home, or outside the office, should be easy. Microsoft OneDrive has long offered a free scanning feature from the OneDrive mobile app which lets you scan and digitize single documents, receipts and more. Up until now, scanning multiple pages and saving them as single document was a premium feature that required a Microsoft 365 subscription. Today we’re making multi-page scanning available for everyone using a OneDrive personal account.

 

What is OneDrive scanning?

With the OneDrive mobile app you can scan physical documents, business cards and whiteboards simply by opening the app and touching the camera icon. Once scanned, OneDrive digitizes the image into a PDF file, which you can then save, share or mark-up with text, pictures, or freehand drawing and writing. Once you scan items into OneDrive, you’ll be able to access them anywhere from any device.

 

 

8 tips for scanning with the OneDrive app

The OneDrive scanning feature can help keep you organized, simplify tasks, and keep your digital files secured in one place. Here’s a list of some of the many ways you can use the OneDrive app to scan:

  1. Scan old photographs and share them with friends and family.
  2. Scan handwritten schoolwork and submit it online or by email.
  3. Scan, sign and send a document. Here’s how: First scan the document, then touch the pencil icon and sign it with your finger. Save the document and share it right from the OneDrive app.
  4. Scan a drawing or your child’s artwork and then share it with family.
  5. Keep digital copies of your receipts and save them to a “receipts” folder.
  6. Capture whiteboard notes.
  7. Scan that pile of business cards in your desk draw.
  8. Keep important documents secured with Personal Vault. You can scan sensitive documents (like tax filings or copies of your passport, driver’s license, and insurance card) directly into OneDrive Personal Vault. These files will be protected behind an extra layer of identity verification.1

What you’ll need to use multi-page scan

Multi-page scan is now available to everyone, everywhere OneDrive is available. You'll need a OneDrive account and the latest version of the OneDrive app on Android (6.5 or higher), or iOS (11.31.5 or higher). The maximum number of pages or images that you can multi-page scan is 10.

 

1) A Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription is required to store more than 3 files in Personal Vault.

Updated May 18, 2020
Version 10.0
  • AndyB660's avatar
    AndyB660
    Copper Contributor

    matt4der 

    The Microsoft Office Lens app allows you to take photos, scan documents, photos of whiteboards and scan business cards. The results can be saved to the local device picture gallery, One Drive and to OneNote, with any text run through OCR to get the details.

    Contact details from Business Cards can be saved to the contact list on the local device, which can be set to default to your Outlook contacts. 

     

  • matt4der's avatar
    matt4der
    Copper Contributor

    I've seen other posts on the same topic but I thought it was worth asking again - is there a way to scan business cards and have their content imported into Outlook contacts? 

  • joepsotka's avatar
    joepsotka
    Copper Contributor

    Microsoft Lens also lets you save the document as a Word file, PDF, or many other formats, and it maintains the photo of the file too.

  • Anilthakur's avatar
    Anilthakur
    Copper Contributor

    Earlier it used to allow 20 sheets in multi page scans, today i discovered its been reduced to 10...very disappointing

  • NeeravDeherkar's avatar
    NeeravDeherkar
    Copper Contributor

    Is there a way to increase the number of maximum pages for multiscan. Right now the limit is only 10.