Microsoft Launches Standalone 'Office Lens' Scanning App for iPhone

Microsoft today announced the launch of the Office Lens app for iPhone, following its debut on Windows Phone last year. Office Lens turns the iPhone into a portable scanner, much like popular scanning app Scanner Pro, but it has the ability to upload scanned documents to both OneNote and OneDrive, making them accessible on all devices.

Office Lens' scanning capabilities are already built into Microsoft's OneNote app for iOS, but today's Office Lens release is a standalone app. It's able to scan things like business cards, notes, restaurant menus, whiteboards, receipts, and more.

Office Lens is able to detect the corners of a document that's being photographed, which allows it to automatically crop the image to the right size. It also cleans it up images and enhances them for better readability, and it can even straighten images taken at an angle.

The app includes optical character recognition (OCR) to make receipts and scanned documents searchable via key word in OneNote or OneDrive, and it's able to convert images of paper documents and whiteboard notes into Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and PDF files.

There's also an option to automatically generate contacts when business cards are photographed, and images scanned can be inserted into OneNote or OneDrive in different formats, including DOCX, PPTX, JPG, and PDF. Images can also be saved, exported, and shared.

Microsoft's Office Lens for iPhone app can be downloaded from the App Store for free. [Direct Link]

Tags: Microsoft, Office Lens

Top Rated Comments

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saintforlife

64 months ago

Loving the new Microsoft. They are quickly becoming one of my favorite companies.

Rating: 8 Votes

Breadman86

64 months ago

Loving the new Microsoft. They are quickly becoming one of my favorite companies.

Seriously. It's kind of getting weird now. I still mostly use apple devices, but I'm surprised by how many Microsoft apps I'm using on those devices, and loving it.

Rating: 5 Votes

jclo

64 months ago

Does MacRumors have an affiliate agreement with AppShopper? Or why do they link to their page instead of directly to the App Store?

AppShopper is our sister site. We link to both because some people don't like to be redirected to the iTunes Store when attempting to look at an app. You can always find the direct iTunes links in the brackets where it says [Direct Link].

Rating: 3 Votes

RaggieSoft

64 months ago

Does MacRumors have an affiliate agreement with AppShopper? Or why do they link to their page instead of directly to the App Store?

AppShopper is run by MacRumors

Rating: 2 Votes

Wiesenlooser

64 months ago

The app is actually quite impressive. The automatic detection and correction of distortion is easily among- if not the best in the App Store

Rating: 2 Votes

jamesdmc

63 months ago

Let's hope so, it would make a use difference for me and for others I reckon.

You reckon correctly.

When I found this app on Friday, I used it at every meeting and wow. I like that I can sit in the corner of the room and it can still take a picture as if I'm in the center.

...and record the meeting notes, too.
...and if you type transcribe the audio, when you play it back, OneNote will highlight the text as the audio plays.

OneNote is awesome. As soon as it became available for the iPad, I ditched Evernote and started futterwacken (http://aliceinwonderland.wikia.com/wiki/Futterwack). Vigorously. :D

Rating: 1 Votes

dragje

64 months ago

I love oneNote and this app is a real good add-on for this. But there is one big downside of the App, I can't photograph more then one page to combine those in just one document. That's a real disappointment because sometimes I get a few important pages and now I'll have to scan them one at the time because after taken one photo you need to upload it before you can continue.

The app would be a 5 star app if one could press a " + " button for taking another picture which the app, when done photographing, will add it all together in one single document.

Rating: 1 Votes

Traverse

64 months ago

I'm super excited for this. OCR is a huge time saver and MS has been really releasing great apps lately. I look forward to try it.

Rating: 1 Votes

Peel

64 months ago

How is the OCR? None of the others I've tried on the App Store are very good.

I'm impressed with the OCR. The document I just scanned had a typo in the original document. Office Lens scanned it with the typo intact, then highlighted it as a misspelled word.

Rating: 1 Votes

lowercaseperson

64 months ago

When i started grad school 2 years ago I switched to Apple's work suite, since it's cheap and I really didn't see anything Office could do much better.

I've not used a MS product in almost 2 years, but had this been out when I started grad school I would have adopted it. I have tons of hand written notes and would love to have a decent OCR system that communicates with my primary word processor. I hope Apple is close behind, or will at least allow developers to integrate with Pages. Very jealous right now.

Rating: 1 Votes

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