Turn Paper Docs into PDFs with OfficeDrop Paper-To-Go for Android
Android app OfficeDrop Paper-To-Go turns paper documents into electronic ones. Just snap a photo with your phone, then sit back while it converts the page into a searchable PDF and uploads it to cloud storage. How crazy-handy is that?
Apps like this are plentiful for iOS, but Android users don't have quite as many options. OfficeDrop may sound a bit like Evernote, and it does have features in common with that awesome service, but the latter is more about, well, notes. OfficeDrop serves a single purpose: to scan paper documents, make them searchable, and store them online.
Check out the OfficeDrop info vid, then meet me below to learn how the app fared with my sample documents.
I used Paper-To-Go and a Samsung Nexus S 4G to scan some magazine pages. Mercifully, it takes just a few seconds to set up an account right on the phone and start using the app, with none of the usual e-mail confirmation nonsense.
Although Paper-To-Go itself is quite easy to use, the end results weren't quite what I expected: All my scans ended up the wrong orientation, regardless of how I held the phone (i.e. portrait or landscape). Consequently, pages ended up squished and difficult to read.
If there's a setting to override this anomaly, I couldn't find it. I don't currently have another phone on which to test the app, so I don't know if the glitch is specific to the Nexus. In any case, there's not much value here until the developer gets it ironed out.
I'm looking forward to that happening. OfficeDrop offers rich document management, with lots of annotation, organization, and sharing options. (It even has Evernote and Google Docs plug-ins.) I particularly like the "reminder" feature that lets you link a document to an entry in your phone's calendar.
Paper-To-Go is free for the first 60 days -- more than enough time to test the waters. After that, premium plans start at $9.99 per month. It's worth noting that Evernote Premium also offers searching within PDFs, but costs just $45 per year.
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