Microsoft has really amped up its efforts to reach out to competing platforms, increasingly offering its software and services on iOS and Android. One of the latest instances is the recent launch of Office Lens for Android, a scanning app that lets you shoot photos of written materials like notepads, printed documents, and whiteboards, converting printed words in the image to editable text through OCR. Other apps like Evernote have performed similar functions, but Microsoft has added some impressive tricks to the genre.

Starting Up

You can get Office Lens from the Google Play store, where it's a reasonable 32MB download. The app requires Android 4.1 or later and you must grant access your phone's camera and photo storage. I tested it on a T-Mobile HTC One M9 running Android 5.0. When you first open the app, it shows you a two-panel animated intro to what it can do, and then you're taken right to the camera view. No sign in or account creation is required to get started, which is something I appreciate.

Interface
The app starts in Camera mode, with buttons for shooting, flash, scanner, and an overflow three-dot menu that gives access to Settings, Import, Recent History, and Resolution. When you point the phone at a document, the app draws a box around what it thinks is text. The Scanner icon lets you choose between document, Whiteboard, or Photo.

Using Office Lens

After you've chosen the shot type and you press the shutter button, you'll get a screen showing your shot, with icons for saving deleting, and cropping. Even after shooting, you can change the shot type—Document or Whiteboard. When you hit the Save button, you get an option to rename the image and then you choose a destination. I was pleased to see that you can save images to OneNote, OneDrive, Word, PowerPoint, or as a PDF. But you can also simply save to your Android photo Gallery, so there's no requirement to use any Microsoft cloud services, which surprises me. OneNote and Gallery were checked by default in my test shot, but I could check or uncheck any combination of targets.

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If you leave OneNote checked, you will, however, be asked to sign into your Microsoft Account. This has the advantage that after you do so, you'll be able to access the shot from OneNote on your PC and any other device with the app installed. You'll also get the advantage of having words in the image converted to editable text via OCR. You'll also get character conversion if you save to Word. If you choose to save as a PDF, the file is stored in your OneDrive storage, and you can open it in any PDF viewer, but you won't get OCR text.

As you might suspect, scanning business cards is a perfect fit for this kind of app, letting you search contacts without having to buy a dedicated card scanner or fumble with actual cards. But in my testing, the OCR only worked for some cards, and it couldn't decipher a curved book page I shot, either. It did, however attempt to straighten out documents shot at odd angles. While you're shooting, you'll see a white-lined box framing your document; it works best if you make sure the box lines are actually framing the paper's edges. If I switched to OneNote too soon after saving, the image wasn't found, but that's understandable, as it to travel through the cloud first. 

You can also apply Office Len's corrections to existing photos in your Android gallery, but I found that, while the Whiteboard mode cleaned up images, the document-straightening and OCR don't work with imported images.

When the OCR does work, the text is placed at the top of the note page. Phone numbers and email addresses are linked: It's pretty cool to be able to start a call or email just by tapping on the OneNote page. Of course, any OCR text is searchable with OneNote's on-page search. I'd hoped to compare Office Lens with Evernote Scannable, but unfortunately, the latter is iOS-only. Grizzly Lab's Genius Scan app does similar things to Office Lens, but that makes you manually fix off angles, doesn't do OCR, and requires a $6.99 upgrade to save to popular cloud services. CamCard is great just for business card scanning, but requires account sign-up and has trouble with creatively formatted cards as well.

Next I tried Office Lens on a whiteboard in one of our conference rooms. Whiteboard shooting mode creates a higher-contrast image with shadows removed, and also straightens out distortion when you shoot at an angle. Scribbled handwriting would render very poorly into text characters in most cases, so OCR isn't supported in this function. But my whiteboard shots were definitely more readable than regular photos of the same boards.

For Android phone owners who also use Microsoft Word Mobile or OneNote, Office Lens is definitely worth a try. And the advantage of OCR and anywhere-access make the synergy with those apps especially appealing. But it's also a useful free utility for cleaning up whiteboard photos and scanning documents and business cards.