How to create PDFs on Android devices using Google Drive

It wasn’t always so simple to create a PDF using your phone. Several years ago, when I started taking care of my mother’s bills, I realized I needed a quick way to scan her documents while I was at her house. Instead of dragging a scanner around, I found a useful Android app called Tiny Scanner which allows me to turn paper documents into easy-to-store PDFs using my phone’s camera.

Later, Google released the beta version of its own scanning app called Stack, so I started using it to create many of my PDFs. It offers quick checks and categorization and is a little more fun to use.

However, as is Google’s custom, the company is now shutting down Stack and providing some (though not all) of the app’s abilities to create, edit, and store PDFs in Google Drive, the storage service app that comes installed in Android phones. (I suppose I should be grateful that Google incorporated at least some of Slack’s features into Android’s Drive app, but the useful categorization and other automatically added details are gone, making it much harder for me to find that document I need right now.)

So now, if you want to create a quick PDF using Drive, it works like this:

You can also edit an existing PDF:

Of course, that’s not all you’d like to do with a PDF file – for example, you might want to remove a page, add text, or password-protect a document. In this case, unfortunately, you will probably have to use Adobe Acrobat or some other paid application.