These days newer smartphones are coming with very powerful built-in cameras that have very high resolution. Android smartphones with 13 mega pixels resolution have become commonplace now. These cameras can capture the picture with so much detail that they can be used for virtually scanning documents and whiteboards instead of using a traditional flatbed scanner. We have previously reviewed CamScanner app for Android that is able to scan documents using the phone camera. And now Microsoft has also released an app called Office Lens which also does a similar job.
Office Lens is an Android app (also available for iPhone, iPad and Windows mobile) that scans paper documents using the camera. This is why you will have better results if your phone has auto-focus camera with high resolution (more than 8 mega pixel is good).
In the app, you can choose what type of paper you are going to scan. It could be a document, whiteboard or just a picture. You can also choose a resolution for the scanned output. Then point the camera to the document, focus it by tapping on the phone screen and then touch the camera button to take the picture aka scan the document.
It shows you the output and allows you to rotate, crop, resize the scanned image. When you choose to save the scanned image, you will see many options – save to OneNote, OneDrive, PowerPoint, PDF or Gallery. Some formats require that your phone has internet access and that you are signed in to your Microsoft account.
Conclusion: Microsoft Office Lens for Android can be very handy tool to scanning documents, whiteboard and pictures. The quality of scanned documents is not as good as the traditional scanner, but works good for most the situations.
You can download Office Lens from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.office.officelens.