How to create PDFs on Android devices using Google Drive

It hasn’t always been that simple to create a PDF using your phone. Several years ago, when I started handling my mother’s bills, I realized I needed a quick way to scan her documents while I was at her home. Rather than drag a scanner around, I found a handy Android app called Tiny Scanner that let me turn paper documents into easy-to-store PDFs using my phone’s camera. 

Later, Google introduced the beta of its own scanning app called Stack, so I began using that to create many of my PDFs. It offers quick scans and categorization and was just a little more fun to use.

However, as is Google’s wont, that company is now sunsetting Stack and giving some (although not all) of the app’s abilities to create, edit, and store PDFs to Google Drive, the storage service app that comes installed on Android phones. (I suppose I should be grateful that Google has incorporated at least some of Slack’s features into Android’s Drive app, but the handy categorization and other automatically added details are now gone, making it just that much more difficult for me to find that one document I need right now.)

So now, if you want to create a quick PDF using Drive, here’s how it works:

You can also edit an existing PDF:

Of course, this isn’t everything you’d want to do with a PDF file — for example, you might want to remove a page, add text, or password-protect a document. In that case, unfortunately, you will probably have to use Adobe Acrobat or some other for-pay app.