How to Create PDF Files on Android Devices Using Google Drive

Creating a PDF with your phone wasn’t always so easy. A few years ago, when I started taking care of my mother’s bills, I realized I needed a quick way to scan her documents when I was at her house. Instead of hauling around a scanner, I found a handy Android app called Tiny Scanner that let me turn my paper documents into easy-to-save PDFs using my phone’s camera.

Then Google rolled out a beta version of its own scanning app called Stack, so I started using it to create a lot of my PDFs. It offers fast scanning and categorization, and it was just a little more fun to use.

But, as is typical with Google, the company is now phasing out Stack and moving some (but not all) of the app’s PDF creation, editing, and storage capabilities to Google Drive, the storage app that comes with Android phones. (I guess I should be grateful that Google has included at least some of Slack’s features in its Android Drive app, but the convenient categorization and other automatically added details are gone, making it even harder for me to find that one document I need just now.)

If you want to quickly create a PDF using Drive, here’s how:

You can also edit an existing PDF file:

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