One of Microsoft's most useful Windows Phone apps just got even better: Office Lens, which is like having a portable scanner in your pocket, now sports improved document scans and, better still, the ability to customize where scans are stored in OneNote.
I wrote about Office Lens earlier this year in OneNote + Office Lens for Windows Phone 8, noting that the mobile app lets you scan in three modes—photo, whiteboard, and document—and then saves the results to your OneNote notebook in OneDrive. Office Lens was always pretty incredible. But this update adds two really neat features that were apparently the top two user requests.
First, it offers improved document scanning, which is the mode you use for scanning receipts and other paper-based documents.
I never found this functionality to be lacking in any way—you can scan a receipt or other document at an angle, for example, and Office Lens will straighten it accurately almost every single time—but Microsoft says that the new version of the app provides better image color, with the white background of receipts and other papers coming out truly white in the finished scan.
The second change is perhaps more profound. Now, instead of saving scans to the Quick Saves section in your default notebook, Office Lens lets you choose where to save scans. So I created a Scans section specifically for this purpose. And now my scans are organized the way I prefer. Nice!
As always, Office Lens is available for free on Windows Phone 8 and up. I strongly recommend grabbing it: This is a truly useful addition to your mobile app arsenal.
You can download Office Lens for Windows Phone 8 and 8.1 from the Windows Phone Store.
