Office Lens app grabs 'experimental' business card mode in latest update

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!

QR: office lens

Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central. He is also the head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007 when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and wearable tech. He has reviewed laptops for over 10 years and is particularly fond of 2-in-1 convertibles, Arm64 processors, new form factors, and thin-and-light PCs. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, performed polysomnographs in NYC, and was a motion-picture operator for 17 years.

Latest in Office 365
Microsoft Word logo in Windows 11 Search.
Microsoft quietly tests free, ad-supported version of Office apps for Windows with limited functionality
Microsoft 365 Copilot
Microsoft's new 'Microsoft 365' rebranding has us all perplexed. Again.
American football using Microsoft technology
How Microsoft 365 excelled my American football team to back-to-back northern championships
Microsoft Office
Final Microsoft 365 Insider blog post marks end of an era... sort of
Microsoft Word open on an HP Spectre x360 16 (2024)
Do you need to buy all of Office or is Word enough?
Microsoft PowerPoint on an iPhone
Microsoft's new iOS widget brings recently accessed Office 365 files directly to your home screen
Latest in News
Cloud servers
Microsoft has killed "several" data center projects in the U.S. and Europe, according to reports — Microsoft responds (Updated)
Photo of Microsoft's new sign-in page for Xbox.com using the Microsoft Edge browser.
Over one billion users will get a new Microsoft user experience, and it has a dark mode
The Thing: Remastered key art
The Thing comes to Xbox Cloud Gaming's "Stream Your Own Game" library alongside other new arrivals
Promotional screenshot of heroes fighting a giant in Pillars of Eternity
Obsidian's classic Baldur's Gate successor 'Pillars of Eternity' is getting a surprise turn-based mode later this year, alongside other updates
Atomfall
Atomfall reviews and Metacritic scores are in: Here's a roundup of what everyone's saying about this new Game Pass survival game
Screenshot of one of the new flat world presets in Minecraft.
Minecraft testing new flat world presets and a better way to locate your friends in-game