Office Lens, the Windows Phone app, can now take a photo and turn it into a Word or PowerPoint document.
Until now, Lens was a way to take photos and drop them directly into OneNote pages. Microsoft promotes this as a way to capture a whiteboard or paper document into your OneNote notes.
Now Office Lens goes a step further. You can take a photo with a Windows Phone and the image will be converted into a Word or PowerPoint document. That’s not just dumping the image into Word, but doing a conversion to text with formatting.
PowerPoint is more complicated. Each part of a drawing is turned into a drawing object in a PowerPoint slide.
Naturally, the conversion isn’t perfect (Optical Character Recognition OCR rarely is) but it’s way better than retyping the whole thing.
Microsoft has provided some sample documents to try the feature out. Understandably, these examples work extremely well with Office Lens.
Lens conversion seems to work best when the source was made in Office in the first place. But it’s worth a try with any document or image.
But Office Lens is only for the 4% of smartphone users with a Windows Phone who can download it for free.
