Microsoft's Office Lens app turns your iPhone or Android handset into a powerful pocket scanner

Microsoft this week introduced Office Lens for iPhone and Android, an app that can turn your handset into a portable scanner. This is the latest in an ever-growing list of apps that Microsoft is making for both iOS, and Android.

Available for Windows Phone devices since last year, Office Lens lets you scan documents, receipts, business cards, whiteboards, menus, and so on. The app recognizes the corners of a document, thus being able to magically enhance, crop, and clean up images. Thanks to OCR (optical character recognition), Office Lens identifies printed text, allowing you to search images by keyword in OneNote and OneDrive. What's more, the app can convert scans into Word documents, PDF files, or PowerPoint presentations.

There's a video in the slideshow below that offers a quick look at Office Lens for iPhone.

While Office Lens for iPhone is already available to download, for free, via Apple App Store (see the first source link below), you can't get it from Google Play yet. However, if you want to try it on Android, you can join the Office Lens Android Preview community on Google+ (see the second source link below), become a tester, and then follow the instructions to download the app.


sources: Apple App Store, Google+ via Office Blogs