Google has pushed out an update to its Google Drive app for Android. It brings a new user interface, a new grid view, and the ability to quickly preview images and other files.

Google Drive for Android also now lets you scan documents with your smartphone camera, recognize the text in those scans, and search for scanned documents once they’re uploaded.

Google Drive scan (OCR)

The new scan feature using Optical Character Recognition, or OCR technology to recognize text in a picture.

That means you can scan receipts, business cards, or other items and then find them later by searching. You don’t need to tag the photos to find that restaurant menu or shipping invoice you scanned last month.

Google Drive also now lets you change fonts, cell alignment and colors in spreadsheets, view file properties without leaving the document editor, and download a copy of a file to a device running Android 3.0 or later.

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3 replies on “Now you can scan documents to Google Drive using your phone”

  1. Using windows and the ios processors it been very easy today to scan and even edit your documents on the phones itself.

  2. I use CamScanner for this. Its much better at scanning, cropping, and turning scanned items into a PDF. You can also sent the scans to other programs as well.

  3. I use Google drive on my phone a lot. I imagine this works much better on smartphones that have high-res rear facing cameras, and not so well (if at all) on cheaper VGA camera-equipped smartphones, like my old Optimus V.

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