OneNote + Office Lens for Windows Phone 8

As part of last week's explosion of new OneNote functionality, Microsoft has released an intriguing new companion app for Windows Phone that lets you record whiteboards, pictures and documents and save them to OneNote. Dubbed Office Lens, this app helps you trim and clean up your shots, and then use OneNote's OCR capabilities to find text within them.

You can download Office Lens for Windows Phone 8 (and, intrigugingly, Windows Phone 8.1) from the Windows Phone Store.

Office Lens uses your Windows Phone's camera like a scanner, letting you take snapshots that will be saved to OneNote. It provides three modes:

Photo. The photo is just stored and synced as a normal image file. Photos are synced to both your OneDrive-based camera roll as well as OneNote.

Whiteboard. Here, Office Lens automatically trims the image to match the borders of the whiteboard, straightens and sharpens the image, and removes glare and shadows.

Document. Here, Office Lens can automatically trim to the document's edges and provide better color matching.

Regardless of which mode you use, however, you can trim the resulting image at any time.

When you save it, it is saved as a new page in the Quick Notes folder in OneNote.

And as promised, when you search OneNote, text in the scanned images will appear in the search results.

Office Lens is a simple but excellent app, and a must-have for anyone using both OneNote and Windows Phone. I'd be surprised if versions for iPhone and Android weren't on the way as well.

You can download Office Lens for Windows Phone 8 (and, intrigugingly, Windows Phone 8.1) from the Windows Phone Store.