8 Things You Didn’t Know You Can Do With PDFs on Google Drive

Google Drive has evolved its functionalities and has become a great Office Suite tool.  Besides being able to view PDFs on it, Google Drive has native features and third party add-ons that allow you to perform many tasks on your PDFs.

Saving From Chrome to Google Drive

If you are using Chrome, you can save your files directly to Google Drive.

  1. Click on the print icon on the bottom right hand corner.
  2. Don’t print. Click on the button labeled ‘change’.
  3. Scroll down until you see the Google Cloud section.
  4. Select ‘Save to Google Drive’.

Search Text (OCR) You can convert text within images or PDFs and make it searchable. To do so using Google drive,

  1. Right click on a PDF.
  2. Select ‘open with’.
  3. Choose Google Docs.
  4. Save in Google Docs format and the document will be searchable.

You can also use Docs.Zone for OCR conversion to Word documents. Export documents to PDF If you have a document that’s not in PDF and you would like to convert it to PDF,

  1. Open the document.
  2. Go to file.
  3. Select ‘download as’.
  4. Choose ‘PDF document’.

If you save the file in the Google Drive folder on your computer, it will sync without you having to manually save the file to Google Drive again. Scan documents To PDF You can save documents and files that are in hard copy to Google Drive to avoid losing them.

  1. Click on icon labeled ‘scan’. It looks like a camera.
  2. The scanner will detect the length and width of the paper and will adjust the image to maintain clarity of the text.
  • With the image scanned, you can edit it using the options available at the top right hand corner.
  • You can also combine photos using the plus (+) sign at the bottom of the screen, and upload them to Google Drive as one PDF file.
  1. Click the check mark at the bottom of the screen and you will get options to name and save the file to Google Drive.

Editing using Notable PDF add on Notable PDF is an app that gives add powerful PDF reader functions to Google Drive. You can:

  • Highlight,
  • Use strikethrough,
  • Use underline function,
  • Add comments.

If you get the premium package, you will be able to work with PDFs offline, and perform tasks such as splitting and merging. Merging with PDF mergy add-on Another functional add on is PDF mergy. To make the merging process easier, save the files in the same place within Google Drive.

  1. Select the files.
  2. Right click, select ‘open with’ and choose ‘PDF mergy’.

This action will import the files into PDF mergy site.

  1. Arrange the files to ensure they are in the correct order. If you want to add or remove some, you can drag and drop files from or to Google Drive.
  2. Click ‘merge’ and rename the merged file.
  3. You can save the file back to Google Drive.

Split using PDFSplit! Add on You can split PDFs in Google Drive using the PDF Split add-on app.

  1. Open the PDF within Google Drive.
  2. In the tool bar at the top of the screen, click on the button that reads ‘open with’.
  3. Choose ‘PDF Split’.
  4. On the page that opens, enter the pages that you want to split.

The ‘more’ button allows you to add more pages.

  1. Select any other relevant options.
  2. Select ‘split’.

Protecting PDFs using PDF Protect add-on Lastly, to keep PDF files on Google Drive even safer, you can use this app to set password, encrypt and set restrictions. This app provides high quality encryption to PDFs, making Google Drive a safer environment for working with PDFs.