If you are a professional or student, rumor has it that Office Lens is one of those must-have apps in your repertoire of tools. The image-processing app takes your photos and effortlessly converts them to OneNote, Power Point, or Word for sharing and saving.
Today, version 1.3.3601.0 is live in the Store and with it, a new feature that turns Office Lens into an OCR business card app.
Office Lens (What's New)
- Images are processed faster, especially on budget devices.
- Business card mode: Introducing an experimental feature that lets you capture Business cards and extract their contact information into OneNote. Contact information is also saved as a VCF file that you can open from OneNote on your PC or phone and add to your contact list. This feature works best with US English-based Business cards right now.
The first bullet point, images are processed faster, appears to be a carryover from last month's update. Unless Microsoft made it even quicker, which we suppose is possible. The second though is certainly much more interesting.
Windows Phone has a few dedicated apps that do nothing but scan business cards and converts them for use in your contacts. Even Samsung created an app to do just that. This experimental feature for Office Lens is similar, although it works more closely with OneNote, which is ideal for document sharing with your team. Likewise, the VCF file saving is also a great universal way to export and share the information as well.
The experimental nature of the optical character recognition (OCR) is US English based for now, so although it may work with other languages, US English is the ideal. Regardless, download the latest version of Office Lens and shout out in comments about the most recent option!
Thanks, Fahmi B., for the tip!
