News
News Categories

Office Lens, Microsoft's mobile scanner app, comes to iOS and Android

By Ng Chong Seng - on 3 Apr 2015, 6:00pm

Office Lens, Microsoft's mobile scanner app, comes to iOS and Android

Office Lens recognizes corners of a document and automatically crops the image. (Image source: Microsoft.)

Microsoft has launched Office Lens, its mobile document-scanning app, for Android and iOS. First launched on Windows Phone a year ago, it turns your smartphone into a scanner, not unlike popular scanner apps such as Scanner Pro and Scanbot. That said, it offers something that most of these other apps don’t - Office integration, especially with OneNote and OneDrive.

The main functionality of Office Lens is easy to understand. You take a picture of anything, be it a receipt, a restaurant menu page, a whiteboard, a paper note, or a business card, and the app will crop, enhance, and save it to OneNote. You don’t really need to take the picture straight up, as Office Lens is able to recognize the corners and adjust the perspective or rotate the image for you. If the document has text, Office Lens will also identify it with OCR (optical character recognition) so that you can search by keyword in OneNote or OneDrive. It can also convert images into Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, or PDF files for easy re-editing and re-formating later. Expectedly, converted images can be inserted to OneNote or OneDrive.

Office Lens also makes for a pretty good business card scanner. When you take a picture of a business card, the information is automatically recognized and properly formated when it’s saved to OneNote. From OneNote, you can search for text that’s on the card or open the attached VCF file to save the details to your contact list.

Office Lens is now out on the iTunes App Store. On Android, it’s offered as a ‘preview’, and to get it, you’ve to join the Office Lens Android Preview community on Google+ and choose to become a tester. You can hit the source link below for more details.

Source: Office Blogs.

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.