Scan Documents with your Android Phone

Whether you are going completely paperless or just want to send digital copies of paper documents, there are a lot of solutions out there for quickly scanning a doc and converting it to PDF for easy archiving and emailing, but most of these devices aren't exactly portable. Here's a quick way to digitize documents with the camera on your Android smartphone.

Although dedicated document scanners are much more effective when going paper-free, if you just need to sign a document and email it or digitize a few pages, check out Handy Scanner on the Android Market.  There is a free version which is likely all you will need, but the paid version offers a higher resolution image.

Download the app and it will walk you through how to use it. It's as simple as taking a photo of the document (hint, depending on the quality of your smartphone's camera and as long as the paper isn't too glossy, be sure to turn flash on for best results). Handy Scanner will crop the image and adjust the perspective, and you can save it as a jpeg or PDF. The app has a few image optimization settings to adjust things like color and contrast quickly to improve the readability.

You can quickly snap multiple pages for a multi-page document and send it via email, or send it to other apps like Evernote, Google Docs, or a Dropbox account. Beyond just document scanning, you can use Handy Scanner to piece together whiteboard meetings - the simple image enhancement options do a great job ensuring readability.

Is your company looking to go paper free? Give us a call at (409) 861-4450 to talk about other technologies to help you digitize documents for a paperless, green office.