Windows Apps Weekly for 08 February 2015 - Office Lens

The apps battle has been well-publicized and talked about around Windows and Windows Phone since the app store concepts came into existence. 

Although the stores do lack what some would consider key apps there are plenty of quality apps from Microsoft and third party developers amongst the over 400,000 total apps in the stores.

Despite recent high profile departures of some banking apps, other companies are stepping up to provide great apps and even update their current offerings.

My plan for this weekly column is to highlight these first and third party apps all of which bring great value to the Windows and Windows Phone platforms.

Enjoy.

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This week’s featured app is Office Lens for Windows Phone.

Remember the days when we had to search for a fax or scanner to get documents into a computer or sent to someone else?

We now effectively walk around with the same capabilities in our pockets and, thanks to the latest update to Microsoft’s Office Lens app, getting those documents to all of our devices or to someone else is as intuitive as taking a picture with your phone.

The latest update now allows you to save pictures you take of documents, whiteboards and business cards as Word, PowerPoint or PDF files.  All of these modes include Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and can be used as a starting point to build a new document out of that scanned text in those images.

Saving of these new documents is integrated with OneDrive and OneNote so that you can create the file on your phone and then access it on any device and easily share it with a friend or colleague thanks to the cloud sharing features and instant ability to upload it to those services.

If you are on Windows Phone it doesn't matter if you use it for business or personal reasons - this is an app that deserves a tile on your Start Screen.

Download Office Lens for Windows Phone

Read more about Office Lens from the Office Blog