Scan documents, business cards, whiteboard using OneDrive on iPhone

Do you want to digitize documents, business cards, whiteboard, your notes, receipts? If you are in a struggle find a traditional scanner, you should try a scanner app on your phone first. Scanning documents using mobile phones is nothing new. It has never been easier to go paperless with a scanner app on cell phone. See how you can scan documents to PDF using iPhone. Even file manager apps, cloud services have now integrated the documents scanning tool. Today, we will introduce the built-in scanner with Microsoft OneDrive app for iOS. You will learn how to scan any files, documents, business cards anywhere.

Search and install the OneDrive app from Apple App Store. Sign in using your Microsoft account. Switch to the Files tab in OneDrive, tap the + button at the top right corner to get the drop-down menu and choose Scan, see below screenshot.

The the Camera window opens. Now choose Business Card, Document or Whiteboard at the lower section of the Camera window. Point your camera to the Business Card, Document or Whiteboard and press the shutter button to scan. The scanner will automatically detect the borders and you have the options to crop, rotate the scannings. Finally touch the Upload button to upload the scanned document or paper in PDF format to your OneDrive account. You can also copy the scanned documents to PDF readers on your iPhone. If you want, you can also save a copy offline on your iPhone so you can access them anywhere on the go even without Wi-Fi or internet connection.

Multi-page scanning – documents scanning alternatives

The free personal account does not support multi-page scanning. If you like to scan multiple docs or pages into a single, shareable PDF using OneDrive on iPhone, you have to upgrade to Office 365 Personal with Premium OneDrive features which costs $6.99/month. Otherwise you can only scan single page documents. Alternatively you can use third party scanner apps below.

• iPhone Scanner Pro –  to scan paper documents to PDF files with iPhone iPad iPod and share via Email, Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, iCloud, etc.
• Adobe Scan – free PDF scanner app turns your iPhone iPad into a powerful portable PDF scanner that support OCR and recognize text automatically.

Update Aug 2019: this article was originally posted in Mar 2018; in this update, another two iPhone scanner apps were added.