The Office Lens app was announced for iPhone this year. This is according to the statement made by Microsoft. The Office Lens app turns your iPhone into a portable scanner and uploads the scanned documents to OneNote and OneDrive something which the popular scanning app Scanner Pro is unable to do. Of course, the scanning concept is not new to the market, but Microsoft was able to integrate Office in it, thus making it stand out from its competition.

The Microsoft OneNote app for iOS already has a built in Office Lens scanning capability. However, the Office Lens that will be released this year is a standalone app. The app would enable the users to scan important documents like business cards, notes, whiteboards, receipts, and many more. Another perk of the Office Lens is that it can detect the edges of the document being scanned. This would then allow the app to crop the image to the right size automatically. The app also cleans the image making it cleaner, straighter and easier to read.

The Office Lens app has an optical character recognition (OCR) which allows the scanned documents to be searchable through the use of keywords in the OneNote or OneDrive. This app can also convert images into Word Documents, PowerPoint Presentations, and PDF files. Imagine scanning the notes left on the board by your teacher and then having the convenience of reading them in word format.

The Office Lens app also lets the users add contacts in a convenient way. Scanned business cards can be converted into contacts when photographed. The scanned images are then inserted into the OneNote or OneDrive in different formats like DOCX, PPTX, JPG, and PDF.

The Office Lens app allows images to be saved, exported, and shared. Talk about convenience. You can download the Office Lens app from the App Store for free but android users need to join the beta community at Google Plus in order to get access to the preview version.