The app, which is free to download on both iOS and Android phones as of Thursday, can save an image as a Word file, PowerPoint presentation or PDF file, and uses optical character recognition to make the text searchable and ready for editing.

Whether you need to share your latest ingenious napkin sketch or grab the text from a photo or screenshot in your pictures folder, Office Lens makes it simple to automatically crop and re-use your content in OneNote, Word or PowerPoint. Office Lens essentially turns a phone into a scanner, using the camera to take a photo of a menu, receipt or business card, for example, and instantly cropping the image and storing it in Microsoft’s OneNote note-taking app, or OneDrive cloud storage app. The new Universal Windows Office Lens app gives your Windows 10 PC, tablet, phone or even HoloLens scanning superpowers.

The app, called Office Lens, is already available on phones running Windows, but has had little exposure given Windows’ minute share of the smartphone market.īringing the app to iOS and Android is the latest sign of Microsoft’s new strategy of putting its best software on as many devices as possible, regardless of whether they are running Windows. SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it is bringing one of its most popular apps, which lets people take photos of a document and turn it into a editable file, to Apple Inc’s iPhone and Google Inc’s Android. A shadow of a man using his mobile phone is cast near Microsoft logo at the 2014 Computex exhibition in Taipei June 4, 2014. You can use Microsoft Lens to convert images to PDF, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files, digitize printed or handwritten text, and save to OneNote, OneDrive, or.

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