Office Lens is a new app for your Windows Phone that turns your phone into a scanner. You can use it to take pictures of things like business cards, menus, post-it notes, on whiteboards or blackboards — anything you want to keep to hand.
Pictures taken with Office Lens are automatically trimmed and enhanced and cleaned up to make them readable. You can then transfer them to OneNote which can be synced with your OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) account making them available on any of your devices.
When you load OneNote on a PC or tablet, it will automatically recognise text within the pictures using OCR (optical character recognition) this makes the text searchable within OneNote. You can also copy the text from the picture and paste it into other apps such as Word and Outlook!
Office Lens has three modes to enhance your pictures:
- Whiteboard mode: removes shadows and glare
- Document mode: makes text clear and easier to read
- Photo mode: allows you to take pictures of people and scenery
Recently I started scanning documents into OneNote rather than carrying around paper files. Now I use Office Lens to take pictures of letters, bills and statements. This means I no longer have to carry bulky paper files, just my Microsoft Surface!