Microsoft Lens (formerly Office Lens) is a mobile companion app for OneNote that was designed by Microsoft to capture, scan, straighten, and enhance images of whiteboards or printed documents and store them in various formats such as PDF files and JPEG images.
Modes
- Photos - best for taking pictures of people or scenery.
- Document - enhances printed images for legibility of small text on flyers, forms, menus, posters, and receipts.
- Whiteboard - adjusts images to minimize glare or shadows on the surface of a whiteboard, blackboard, or sketch for improved legibility.
- Business Card - extracts information from a card to add to OneNote and the device's contacts. Supported languages include English, German, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese.
- Actions (Android only) - for extracting data from the image and initiating other actions:
- Contact - to save the information to contacts, like Business Card mode.
- QR Code - to launch websites and view or share other data associated with the code.
- Read - to verbally dictate aloud the text in the image.
- Table - to organize the data in the image into a table that can be copied or shared.
- Text - to extract text from the image that can be copied or shared.
History
Microsoft Lens was first launched as "Office Lens" for Windows Phone on March 17, 2014, and was available for Windows 10 and later (x86 and ARM).[1] It was released for Android and iOS on April 2, 2015, where it is marketed as "Microsoft Lens: PDF Scanner".[2]
Microsoft Lens was retired on December 15, 2025, at which point users can no longer create new scans; existing scans will still be available.[3] It will be removed from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store on December 25, 2025, with the ability to scan documents in the app to remain until January 25, 2026.[4]
References
- ↑ Office Lens: A OneNote scanner for your pocket, Microsoft. 2014-03-17.
- ↑ Microsoft launches document scanning Office Lens app for iPhone and Android phones by Emil Protalinski, VentureBeat. 2015-04-02.
- ↑ Microsoft killing its free highly rated document scanner app soon this year by Sayan Sen, Neowin. 2025-08-08.
- ↑ Retirement of Microsoft Lens, Microsoft Support. Accessed 2025-11-06.
See also
- Microsoft Photos, a photo and video management app for Windows and Xbox.
External links
- Microsoft Lens (for Windows) at the Microsoft Store
- Office Lens for Windows at Microsoft Support
- Microsoft Lens - PDF Scanner (for Android) at Google Play
- Microsoft Lens for Android at Microsoft Support
- Microsoft Lens: PDF Scanner (for iOS) at the Apple App Store
- Microsoft Lens for iOS at Microsoft Support
- Microsoft Lens at Logopedia
- Microsoft mobile services: Microsoft Lens at Wikipedia