Microsoft’s Office Lens app lets you capture images with a smartphone camera, clean them up automatically, and save them to OneNote. Up until recently Office Lens was available exclusively for Windows Phone. But now the app is available for iOS. There’s also a preview available for Android.

It’s available as a free download from the App Store or Google Play Store (after you join the beta community)

office lens iOS

Sure, you could always just snap photos of documents with your smartphone camera. But Office Lens does a few nifty things to your photos, including:

  • Recognize the corners and automatically crop an image
  • Identify printed text and use optical character recognition to make text from your photos searchable in OneNote or OneDrive
  • Convert images to PDF, Word, or PowerPoint files that can be edited and reformatted
  • Capture information from a business card and use it to add a contact to your phone

The app can also straighten out images snapped at an angle, which means you can take a picture of a document, whiteboard, receipt, or other object and convert it into a usable document even if your camera if it’s not facing your camera directly.

via Microsoft

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2 replies on “Microsoft Office Lens app turns Android, iPhone devices into pocket scanners”

  1. That’s pretty awesome, is it available for windows tablets, RT maybe? Going to check, I have my Surface RT with me.

    1. No, not for tablets running windows that I can find. It’s not at the Win App store. dissapointed.

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