Microsoft on Thursday rolled out its mobile document scanner app ‘Office Lens’ for iOS and Android smartphones. The app is already available on phones running Windows.
Office Lens basically turns a phone into a scanner and uses the camera to take snapshots of paper documents, receipts, business cards, menus, whiteboards and sticky notes and instantly crops the image and stores it in Microsoft’s OneNote note-taking app, or OneDrive cloud storage app.
Once saved, users can convert the photos into Word documents, PowerPoint presentations or PDFs. The app uses optical character recognition to convert written images into searchable, editable text. Users can even use Office Lens to photograph business cards and generate contact info.
“Office Lens is a handy capture app that turns your smartphone into a pocket scanner and it works with OneNote so you’ll never lose a thing,” Microsoft noted in a blog post.
“Use it to take pictures of receipts, business cards, menus, whiteboards or sticky notes—then let Office Lens crop, enhance and save to OneNote. Just like that—all the scanned images you capture from Office Lens are accessible on all your devices.”
Office Lens is currently available for iPhone users through the App Store as a free download. The Android version of the app is also available but only as a preview. Android users wishing to join the preview can join the Google+ group and sign up to be a beta tester.
