With a lot of people trying to go for a paperless lifestyle, scanning documents is becoming second nature for us, and we’re not talking about those huge flatbed scanners or even the 3-in-1 kind of printer/scanner, which you obviously can’t lug around. We’re now into the age of apps that can scan documents and then readjust them so they won’t look just like another picture. One of the more popular ones (well, at least for Windows phone users) is Microsoft‘s Office Lens and it is now available for Android devices.
Office Lens is a capture app which doesn’t just take pictures, but in fact will enhance the image and then save it to OneNote, which is pretty handy especially if you’re dependent on Microsoft’s note-taking app (and the entire Microsoft digital eco-system actually). It will automatically crop and clean up your image because it can recognize the corners of a document and then process and enhance it for you. It also has OCR (optical character recognition) so that you can search for the scanned document through keywords either in OneNote or in the cloud storage app OneDrive.
You can capture receipts, business cards, documents, and even notes on your whiteboard. And those paper documents and notes can actually be converted into Word, PDF, Powerpoint, etc, so you can edit and reformat easily and export and share on various apps. The business cards you scan can also be added to your smartphone’s contacts as well.
However, the app is still on preview mode for Android devices, so you won’t be able to find it yet on the Google Play Store. You need to join the Office Lens Android Preview group on Google+ first then choose to “Become A Tester” and the instructions will be there for you.
SOURCE: Microsoft Office
