Office Lens is now Microsoft Lens, new scanning features arriving soon

One of the many Chinese-origin apps banned by the government last year included INTSIG’s CamScanner, once popular among Android and iOS in the country. Users who relied on these apps had to then seek popular alternatives, including Adobe Scan and Microsoft’s Office Lens instead. The latter is now being rebranded, and is receiving important new features, the company recently stated.

In a post on the Microsoft 365 blog, the company stated that it was changing the name of the app from Office Lens, to Microsoft Lens. The app’s logo has also been updated to better reflect Microsoft’s other Microsoft 365 icons like OneDrive and OneNote - this change has already reflected on the Apple’s App Store.

Microsoft has also added in smart features to the scanner app such as the ability to scan information into a contact, scan an image to text, replicate a table in an image, a QR code scanner, as well as an Immersive Reader.

Read more: Microsoft 365 got better for Mac users with apps optimised for Apple Silicon, Outlook support for iCloud accounts etc

The rebranded Microsoft Lens is also adding support for the ability to reorder pages, make changes to a PDF that has already been scanned, automatically apply a filter to all images in a document. Users can also scan PDFs with upto 100 pages, while choosing local or cloud locations when saving PDFs. The app will also add indicators to help show which files are local or cloud-based.

Microsoft says the new features will be added to the app first on Android, then on iOS devices in the coming months. Integration with other Microsoft 365 mobile apps will also follow, the company states, which will include Office, Teams, Outlook and OneDrive.