Microsoft launches its Office Lens document scanner app on Android

Continuing with Microsoft’s new mission under CEO Satya Nadella to make its productivity software available everywhere that potential customers are, the company officially released its Office Lens document scanner app for Android today to the Google Play Store.

Microsoft ran a public preview of Office Lens for Android from April 2nd up until today through the Google+ communities method, which they say had over 130,000 testers, and Android was the only place where they tested it with users before launch. Here’s how the company describes the functionality of Office Lens in its announcement:

“From receipts to whiteboards, books to legal documents, the Office Lens Android pocket scanner recognizes the corners of any rectangular media and automatically crops, straightens and enhances the image, which can be saved to multiple sources at the same time.“

Microsoft says the public preview included getting valuable feedback from users testing the app on over 270 makes of phones and just under 2,600 models. As a result of refinements made to the user experience from extensive user feedback, Android users can save to multiple sources – they name OneDrive and Word as examples – at the same time, a task that involves more steps on iPhone. I’m not sure how gaining user feedback made it possible for Microsoft to remove friction from the Android app and not the iOS app, but I’m not complaining!

Here’s the full list of features:

• Converts images of paper documents, electronic screens and whiteboard notes into Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and searchable PDF files for easy storage, editing and reformatting.
• Enables images to be sent via email, making it easy to share whiteboard notes with work colleagues, submit scanned business expense receipts or ensure family and friends have copies of important paper documents.
• Captures business cards and generates contacts, which can be sent to OneNote and added to your phone.
• Recognizes the corners of a document and automatically crops, enhances and cleans up the image.
• Identifies printed text with optical character recognition (OCR) so that you can search by keyword for the image in OneNote or OneDrive.
• Inserts images to OneNote or as DOCX, PPTX or PDF files in OneDrive, providing options to save, export and share the image.