Office Lens RIP, long live Microsoft Lens

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Having declared the death of Office Lens on all platforms, as a separate application, I was half right, at least. It's gone from Windows 10 Mobile, it's now part of Windows 10 Camera on Desktop, and apparently going to carry on as an existing application on iOS and Android (as well as being part of Office) but under a new name.

From Microsoft:

We're taking the next step in our evolution by changing our name and logo from Office Lens to Microsoft Lens and adding some dynamic new features. Along with the new identity, we are bringing intelligent actions into the camera, including: Image to Text, Image to Table, Image to Contact, Immersive Reader, and QR Code Scan. 

thumbnail image 2 captioned Image to text

We are releasing an improved scan experience allowing you to re-order pages, re-edit scanned PDFs, apply a filter to all images in the document, scan up to 100 pages as images or PDFseasily switch between local and cloud locations while saving PDFalong with an easy way to identify local and cloud files.  

We will be rolling out these new features and improvements on Android first and then follow up with iOS in the coming months! Please refer to our support documentation for Android and iOS for further details.  

Pretty cool - it's a little painful seeing the tortuous shifting of platforms and name, but the underlying technology continues to get better and you just know that there will be a day in the future when scanning a multi-page document to PDF with simultaneous OCR will utterly save the day, so do keep Office Lens, sorry.... Microsoft Lens in mind!