Tech giant Microsoft has announced that it will be launching Office Lens for iOS and Android users. Microsoft's Office Lens was originally made available only for Windows Phone a year ago.
The Office Lens turns users' mobile phones into a scanner, allowing them to take a photo of important documents and receipts and then apply enhancements. Aside from the feature of instantly converting hard copies into images, Office Lens can also apply corrections and convert the images into PDF, Word, and Powerpoint files.
For example, once a user captures a document into a picture file, Office Lens scans the image and identifies the printed texts through optical character recognition. In this way, the app converts the image into either a Word document, a Powerpoint file, or a PDF file so that users can easily edit and format the converted information. And since it is already in a digital format, the document can then be saved virtually.
Aside from converting hardcopy documents into virtual formats, the Office Lens can also take a snapshot of business cards and automatically generate contact information, to be saved in the user's contacts list on the mobile phone. Also, even if the captured snapshot is crooked, Office Lens can automatically skew and crop the image and clean it for document conversion.
Office Lens for iPhone users is free to download at the Apple App Store. For Android users, they must go first to the Office Lens Preview tab in the Google+ Community page, join it, and click the Become a Tester link.
The release of Office Lens for testing outside the company's native Windows Mobile operating system is one of the more recent changes by Microsoft to expand its base. Early this year, the company announced that its upcoming Windows 10 operating system will be a free-of-charge upgrade for owners of previous Windows OS versions.
