IT'S A SCAN!

If you have a smart phone, you can scan. Portable scanners work Okay, but why bother if you can use your smart phone and get the same results. 

A recent article on the "Wirecutter" web site discusses scanning apps for your smart phone. He gives three opitons.

“This may seem shocking, but unless you’re an accountant or archivist, you probably don’t need a traditional scanner—today’s smartphone scanning apps are simply that good. After spending more than 35 hours researching 20 scanning apps and testing seven of them, we’ve determined that our favorite is the lean and efficient Adobe Scan (for Android and iOS). It’s dead simple to use, capable of beautiful scan quality, and equipped with excellent text-recognition capabilities. Best of all, it’s totally free—even for iPhone owners.”

ADOBE SCAN

Adobe Scan (for Android and iOS) is great at capturing the sort of documents life throws at you on a once-in-a-while basis—stuff like rebate forms, tax documents, and the occasional business card. It isn’t as complex or powerful as apps like CamScanner or our upgrade pick, Scanbot, and it can export only PDFs.

MICROSOFT LENS

"If you like the sound of Adobe Scan’s simplicity but spend a lot of time working in the Microsoft Office suite, Microsoft Office Lens (Android and iOS) is the way to go. Its user interface is similarly stripped down, but the output options include Word documents and PowerPoint slides in addition to PDFs. Its scans don’t look as clean as what you can get from Adobe Scan or Scanbot, and you may find its sharing options annoyingly limited. But its world-class text recognition almost makes up for those drawbacks."

SCANBOT

"Scanbot (Android and iOS) is a more full-featured app than Adobe Scan or Office Lens, offering stuff like custom folders for better organization, smart file naming, iCloud syncing, and automatic uploading to your choice of more than a dozen cloud storage services. Scanbot produces good-looking scans across a variety of document types, including books, business cards, and even photos. It can perform OCR in 60 languages, and the results are very good, if not quite best in class. "