Ever wish you had a pocket scanner that could sharpen, crop, straighten, OCR text, and then convert it to PDF, Word, or PowerPoint? With Office Lens you’ve got it! Recently, I needed to do a quick scan of a signature page on my phone and save it in PDF format. Office Lens, which is a scanner app from Microsoft, worked like a charm. I picked the scan type, set the flash, snapped a picture, and saved it in PDF format to my personal OneDrive account. I could just as easily have saved into one of my many OneNote notebooks too.

Office Lens Uses:

• Digitize notes on whiteboards and blackboards
• Scan business cards, receipts or sticky notes
• Sketch out ideas and snap a picture for later

Office Lens really does make your snapshots more readable. I’ve been astounded at the ability of Office Lens to “clean up” images, especially from whiteboards. Take a look at the samples on this page and you’ll see what I mean. Better yet, try it out for yourself.

Scan Types and Features:

• Document – trims and colors images perfectly
• Whiteboard – trims and cleans up glare and shadows
• Photo – saves to your device’s camera roll or directly into OneNote or OneDrive
• Business Card – contact info is saved to OneNote and as a .VCF file to easily add to your contacts

Specifications:

• Office Lens is available for Windows 8/8.1/10, as well as both the iOS and Android platforms.
• By default, your snapshots are saved to either OneNote or OneDrive, so they are accessible from any of your devices.
• You will need a OneDrive account (5 GB free storage) to use Office Lens and save documents, but you may also save to your device’s photo gallery as images.