After releasing a preview of the handy document scanning app for Android in April as well as an official version for iPhone, Microsoft has now made it available for Android in the Google Store to 130 countries in 30 different languages. The app, which had over 130,000 previewers and works as a pocket sized scanner, has gained some positive reviews and high ratings with one reviewer calling the app flawless. For Windows Phone Microsoft said that Office Lens has become one of the company’s star apps with 3.5 million downloads.

Why is that? Office Lens works with your phone’s camera in scanning documents, menus, business cards, making what might otherwise have been fuzzy text into readable words. It does this by enhancing the picture, straitening and trimming it, and taking out any shadows. In Whiteboard mode glare and shadows are cleaned up and in Document Mode text is rendered clear and legible. Your scans can then be saved to OneNote in either the DOCX, PPTX, JPG format, or as a PDF in OneDrive, ready to be shared and exported. There’s also an optical character recognition (OCR) function, which means that Office Lens can capture individual words that appear in an image and then give you information pertaining to that word.

Some of the main uses Microsoft reports have been sharing whiteboard notes between employees, scanning receipts, and sharing important information that needs to get to friends and family immediately. It’s also pretty useful if you’re the type of person who still likes to work freehand but needs to save your writing on a computer. One thing to note is that it isn’t magic, and so if your photo is completely unreadable due to darkness, blurriness, or you were shaking all over the place, it won’t make everything suddenly coherent.

Photo credit: Microsoft