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

saintforlife

111 months ago

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

Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Breadman86

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.

Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)

jclo

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].

Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)

RaggieSoft

AppShopper is run by MacRumors

Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Wiesenlooser

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

jamesdmc

110 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

Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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