One of the best and most popular scanning applications, Office Lens, is now on iOS and has a preview version available for Android. Office Lens allows users to scan documents, whiteboards, and more and have them saved to OneNote and OneDrive. A post on the Office Blog outlines some of the features that are available for the iOS version.
- Recognizes the corners of a document and automatically crops, enhances and cleans up the image.
- Identifies printed text with optical character recognition (OCR) so that you can search by key word for the image in OneNote or OneDrive.
- Converts images of paper documents and whiteboard notes into Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and PDF files for easy editing and reformatting (see more details here).
- Captures business cards and generates contacts you can add to your phone.
- Inserts images to OneNote or OneDrive (as DOCX, PPTX, JPG or PDF format) and gives you options to save, export and share the image.
To get the preview version for Android you just follow the download link below, click the “join community” box, and click to become a tester in the lower right hand corner. According to the Office blog post the Android features are similar to those on iOS.
It’s not an exaggeration when they say that Office Lens enhances and cleans up images. Sometimes Office Lens captures are easier to read than the original white board or document you scanned. The integration with OneNote and Office is great and the ability to search through text using the same technology as OneDrive is extremely useful.
It’s worth noting that I tried to download it on an iPhone in the UK and didn’t have success. It may be the device I’m using but it’s worth keeping an eye on.
Further reading: Android, iOS, Office, Office Lens
