Today, the Office Team has announced Office Lens. Office Lens is essentially a scanner in your pocket that uses your Windows Phone’s camera to take pictures of things like business cards, restaurant menus, and notes on whiteboards or blackboards – and scans them to OneNote. Download Office Lens today from the Windows Phone Store.
Office Lens: Before and after
You can use Office Lens to scan almost anything you want into OneNote. When you scan something in using Office Lens, it will make whatever you scanned in more readable by trimming and enhancing the photo. It will straighten weird angles or clean up shadows for example. Once your image is scanned into OneNote, it’ll sync across all your devices courtesy of OneDrive. If something you scanned has printed text like a movie poster for example, OneNote on a PC has optical character recognition (OCR) to recognize text within the images your scan in with Office Lens. You can search for words within those images as well as edit the text, or copy and paste it into apps like email and documents.
For a little bit of some geeky behind-the-scenes stuff, you can read up on how Microsoft Research helped with Office Lens.
You can see Office Lens in action by watching the following video:
Office also announced today that OneNote is free everywhere. If you don’t already have OneNote, head on over to OneNote.com and get it today!