Scanning documents using the mobile phone camera is not new at all, there are already many apps that can do it both using an Android smartphne and an iPhone. We have seen the main ones in a special list on the free App scanners for documents on iPhone and Android .
As seen in that article, not only is it possible to photograph paper documents and turn them into digital PDFs, but it is also possible, with Google Keep or other apps, to make the content of the sheet of paper editable.
The free Microsoft Office Lens app does just that, makes any page printed on paper editable with Word or other Office programs .
Office Lens can be used to scan documents from any angle (although it would be better to photograph them from the front) and, automatically, the software will be able to correct the perspective of the document and to clean up the photo as if a scanner had been used.
Thanks to OCR technology for optical character recognition, the images, text and tables of the scanned documents can be modified with Office programs and with Onenote .
Office Lens can also be used on other occasions, for example to automatically save business card data with a simple scan.
Office Lens can export notes in various formats including JPEG, PDF and Office Word or Powerpoint files and all scans can also be saved online in OneNote or Microsoft OneDrive.
Office Lens, for its perfect integration with Office programs, is one of the most popular apps in the Lumia and Windows Phone smartphone store and has now also become available on iPhones and Android phones.
Office Lens for iPhone can be downloaded immediately, in Italian, from iTunes while for Android it can now be downloaded from the Google Play Store .
You can also use Office Lens from Windows 10 and 8.1 PCs to scan documents only using the webcam.
Among the general features, Office Lens allows you to:
- Identify the printed text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) so you can search for words.
- Convert images of paper documents and written text into Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and PDF files.
- Acquires information from business cards and automatically generates contacts in the phone's address book.
- Can save scanned documents in PDF DOCX, PPTX, JPG format in OneNote or Microsoft OneDrive.
