How To Scan Paper Documents to Google Drive with Android

Last Updated on May 23, 2013

Google Drive’s new Android app comes with awesome new functionality. It allows you to scan documents to your Google Drive as a PDF and includes Optical Character Recognition.

To use this new feature, you’ll need the latest Google Drive app update, which also includes a new card-based interface, similar to Google Now.

It not only allows you to “scan” documents – actually, take a picture of them and save as a PDF file in your Google Drive. It actually uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to recognize characters and turn your “scans” into searchable documents.

Scan a Paper Document to Google Drive

Launch the Google Drive app on your Android device and tap the options button, then “Add new” from the menu.

Then tap Scan on the menu that comes up.

Now take a picture of your document, but make sure you fit it all in the image.

Once that’s done, the document will be uploaded to your Google Drive as a PDF. It will be given a name like scanned_date-time. This will make it easy for you to search for scanned documents later.

While you can’t search for a word inside the PDF when it’s open in the Google Drive Viewer, the character recognition does work. Just try searching for a word inside the document with the Google Drive search function. You’ll notice that the document is found.

If the scanned documents have parts chopped out of them by the time they get to Drive, make sure you take a look at the Android app’s settings. Make sure the image quality is set to high (that will ensure better recognition) and make sure to set the correct paper size.