Hot on the heels of today’s OneNote news, Microsoft releases Office Lens for Windows Phone. This free app essentially transforms your handset into a scanner complete with OCR (optical character recognition) so text and handwriting can be converted into an editable form. Integration with OneNote makes the app even more useful, as captured notes will be synced between all of your devices.
Whether you’re looking to store text from a book, save a business card you have been handed, or want to keep details printed on a poster, Office Lens can do it all with the snap of a camera lens. OCR means that the text and images you capture become searchable, so you need never manually hunt for the information you need.
The photos you take are saved to your phone’s camera roll as well as OneNote, so you have copies in a couple of formats.
Office Lens offers a couple of capture modes to cater for different situations. Switch to Whiteboard mode — ideally suited for grabbing handwritten notes from a whiteboard, as the name suggests — and images will be automatically trimmed, and colors and shadows will be optimized. Similarly, in Document mode, colors will be adjusted.
In both scenarios, there is no need to worry about taking photos head on and absolutely square. Any angled shots will be automatically straightened up for you and the perspective will be adjusted for perfect readability.
Grab yourself a copy of the app from the Windows Phone Store using the download link below!
