Microsoft brings Office Lens App to iPhone and Android

Microsoft releases Office Lens on competing platforms. The versatile and free scanning app has been available only on Windows Phones so far.

I am a big fan of Microsoft’s new cross platform strategy. With no significant mobile OS marketshare it also the only way to grow their software business and stay relevant in the mobile space. 

Microsoft released now a little tool on iOS and Android that has though proven to be very convenient to Windows Phone users. Office Lens is capture app that turns your smartphone into a pocket scanner and it works with OneNote. User can take pictures of receipts, business cards, menus, whiteboards or sticky note. Office Lens crops, enhances and saves it to OneNote. All the scanned images you capture from Office Lens are accessible on all your devices.

The video below shows the impressive capabilities of Office Lens and how it generates a neat document from images captured at an angle.

Office Lens for iPhone supports:

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.

The Office Lens app is free download on iTunes.

The Android version of Office Lens is only a preview version. To get the app, follow these steps:

1) Go to Office Lens Android Preview in the Google+ community.

2) Click Join community in the upper right-hand corner.

3) Under About this community, click the Become a Tester link and then follow instructions on the page.