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Microsoft Launches Standalone 'Office Lens' Scanning App for iPhone

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Apr 12, 2001
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Microsoft today announced the launch of the Office Lens app for iPhone, following its debut on Windows Phone last year. Office Lens turns the iPhone into a portable scanner, much like popular scanning app Scanner Pro, but it has the ability to upload scanned documents to both OneNote and OneDrive, making them accessible on all devices.

Office Lens' scanning capabilities are already built into Microsoft's OneNote app for iOS, but today's Office Lens release is a standalone app. It's able to scan things like business cards, notes, restaurant menus, whiteboards, receipts, and more.

Office Lens is able to detect the corners of a document that's being photographed, which allows it to automatically crop the image to the right size. It also cleans it up images and enhances them for better readability, and it can even straighten images taken at an angle.

The app includes optical character recognition (OCR) to make receipts and scanned documents searchable via key word in OneNote or OneDrive, and it's able to convert images of paper documents and whiteboard notes into Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and PDF files.

There's also an option to automatically generate contacts when business cards are photographed, and images scanned can be inserted into OneNote or OneDrive in different formats, including DOCX, PPTX, JPG, and PDF. Images can also be saved, exported, and shared.

Microsoft's Office Lens for iPhone app can be downloaded from the App Store for free. [Direct Link]

Article Link: Microsoft Launches Standalone 'Office Lens' Scanning App for iPhone
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2015/04/02/microsoft-launches-office-lens-for-iphone/
When i started grad school 2 years ago I switched to Apple's work suite, since it's cheap and I really didn't see anything Office could do much better.

I've not used a MS product in almost 2 years, but had this been out when I started grad school I would have adopted it. I have tons of hand written notes and would love to have a decent OCR system that communicates with my primary word processor. I hope Apple is close behind, or will at least allow developers to integrate with Pages. Very jealous right now.
 
I like that they didn't even bother saying you could get it for Windows Phone as well. Come on, Microsoft, you have to at least say that it's one of the 5 decent apps that Windows Phone has.
 
The app is actually quite impressive. The automatic detection and correction of distortion is easily among- if not the best in the App Store
 
I'm a big Genius Scan user—quick creation of clean, multi-page PDFs from badly-lit crooked snapshots! My iPhone had been my main scanner for years now.

But I don't think it has OCR, so that could be nice for searching. (In my case, searching for the document name—or the name of the folder the document is in—covers all my needs. I don't need full-content search.)
 
The app itself is fine, although it lacks automatic mode that many of its competitors have. But the app lacks ability to search and open previously scanned files directly (it can only be opened by OneNote, Word, or PowerPoint).

Having said that, OCR engine works well but it requires free OneDrive account (which is still better than having to pay $5/month for Evernote Premium, which only allows OCR search).
 
Don't see the option of saving a business card as a contact. When I scan a card (which it did an amazing job of) the export options are OneNote, OneDrive, Word, PowerPoint, PDF Mail or Photo Library. Am I missing something here?
 
I frequently scan documents and upload them to OneDrive. I'd switch from Scanner Pro for this if only it supported multi-page documents. Even for a 1.0 release this should be standard.
 
thmshale said:
I'd switch from Scanner Pro for this if only it supported multi-page documents. Even for a 1.0 release this should be standard.
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that sucks. I'm using Scanner Pro as well. Good to know I don't have to waste time trying this out on the first release. thanks!
 
rmatthewware said:
How is the OCR? None of the others I've tried on the App Store are very good.
Click to expand...

It actually is pretty good. The only kink is that you need to export to Word, which requires that you have Word for iOS installed on your phone.
 
rmatthewware said:
How is the OCR? None of the others I've tried on the App Store are very good.
Click to expand...

I'm impressed with the OCR. The document I just scanned had a typo in the original document. Office Lens scanned it with the typo intact, then highlighted it as a misspelled word.
 
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Does MacRumors have an affiliate agreement with AppShopper? Or why do they link to their page instead of directly to the App Store?
 
manu chao said:
Does MacRumors have an affiliate agreement with AppShopper? Or why do they link to their page instead of directly to the App Store?
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AppShopper is our sister site. We link to both because some people don't like to be redirected to the iTunes Store when attempting to look at an app. You can always find the direct iTunes links in the brackets where it says [Direct Link].
 
Since this has already been answered twice and I can't figure out how to delete this post on mobile - mods feel free to delete.


I think Arn (or MacRumors) owns part (or all) of App Shopper, but either way they always include a direct link in the bottom of the story to bypass it.
 
I'm super excited for this. OCR is a huge time saver and MS has been really releasing great apps lately. I look forward to try it.
 
jclo said:
AppShopper is our sister site. We link to both because some people don't like to be redirected to the iTunes Store when attempting to look at an app. You can always find the direct iTunes links in the brackets where it says [Direct Link].
Click to expand...
Fair enough, but that connection between the two sites is not exactly well publicised.
 
Looks really good. Downloaded and scanned a few pages, looks promising.
 
rhoydotp said:
that sucks. I'm using Scanner Pro as well. Good to know I don't have to waste time trying this out on the first release. thanks!
Click to expand...

It's a free app, why not download it and give it a try? Then when it's updated with that feature you can try it more.
 
saintforlife said:
Loving the new Microsoft. They are quickly becoming one of my favorite companies.
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Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. It's been Microsoft's motto since forever. They get you hooked, drop support, and force you to their solutions. And don't think you can get out either - they make that near impossible.

Beware - we've seen this before from them. It's best to stay far, far away from anything Microsoft. those of us that have been around the block have seen this before in the 80's, 90's and now today. A Leopard doesn't change it's spots...
 
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