Turn OneNote into a Receipt Scanner for Expenses

Today, Microsoft has released a major update to the OneNote app for Windows 8.1. Microsoft goes through all the details HERE, and Paul Thurrott gives his take HERE. As a quick rundown, here's a bullet-pointed list for what's been updated:

If you want the full details, definitely check out the links above.

I use OneNote constantly. Evernote used to be my mainstay, but improvements in OneNote over the past year or so caused me to leave Evernote behind forever (maybe).

But, one of the true value-adds for today's release, I'll present in the form of a tip.

The new Camera Scan has three different modes: Photo, Document, and Whiteboard.

The Photo mode is obvious. Snap a picture and save it to OneNote. But, the Whiteboard and Document modes are particularly interesting to me. These modes will automatically crop, rotate, and sharpen the captured image so that it looks just like a document that has been scanned using a true scanner. To me, this is a perfect solution for scanning in receipts during travel, sharing them to a specific OneNote notebook (stored in SkyDrive), and then forwarding them on to the company finance department. And, if this isn't valuable enough, OneNote provides OCR capability, meaning you can actually search text in the picture.

Here's a couple videos showing the new Camera Scan and the OCR capability so you can concoct some useful ideas of your own.

Camera Scan

OCR