Yesterday I was reading a pretty hilarious press release by OfficeDrop about how they’ve been growing like crazy since switching focus from a mail-in scanning service to being focused on mobile apps and the online, connected office.
As I was reading, it occurred to me that I have never actually taken a look at the company’s mobile apps, and since they recently released a big update to their iPad app, there’s no time like the present.
Get An Account
In order to use their iPad app, you need an OfficeDrop account. Fortunately, they have a good free plan, so head on over to OfficeDrop.com and sign up.
There are paid plans too of course, but for our purposes we’ll start with the free one.
Get The iPad App
The OfficeDrop iPad app is free, so get it from the App Store.
When you first launch it, you are prompted to sign up for an OfficeDrop account, but since we have already created one, hit the Login link at the bottom.
When you first login, you are prompted with a list of your files in OfficeDrop. If, like me, you’ve just signed up for an account, that will obviously be blank.[1]
Put Stuff Into The iPad App
There are a bunch of different ways that you can get documents into the iPad app.
Save From Email
If you have email attachments, if you tap and hold on the icon in an email, you will be prompted to “Open In” an application (most likely iBooks), and then there will be another option that says Open In…. If you tap that, you’ll have the ability to choose which application to open the PDF in.
Choose OfficeDrop and it will open the document in the iPad app.
Save From Almost Any App
That Open In functionality isn’t limited to just mail attachments. Almost any application that stores PDFs will allow you to tap and hold to bring up the Open In menu. OfficeDrop should be in there iPad-wide.
Email Files In
OfficeDrop allows you to email files in to the service, and they will appear in the OfficeDrop iPad app.
To find your email address, click on the Settings icon at the bottom of the app, and you will see your address there. Handily, they’ll even add it to your Contacts if you’d like.
For example, I emailed this PDF to my OfficeDrop address and here it is in the iPad app.
Attach From Camera Roll
If you already have images in your iPad’s Camera Roll, you can attach them in the app.
Scan Documents
If you have an iPad 2, it has a camera. And if you have a camera on an iOS device, you have a document scanner!
As has been well documented, the iPad 2’s camera isn’t the greatest, but it can get the job done. Here’s a color scan that I did with the OfficeDrop app and the iPad 2’s camera.
One nitpick I have is that when you use the camera to scan the document, the app will let you crop the scan (which is good), but it will only do the crop in a rectangle. It would be better if it worked similar to other iOS scanning apps where you can tailor the crop to the inevitably weird shape of the camera’s picture.[2]
Doing Something With The Documents
Of course, just adding documents into the app isn’t going to do you much good. You want to be able to do something with them.
Upload
In the Saved section of the app, you can upload your documents to the OfficeDrop site. This will allow you to access your documents from a browser or any of the company’s other applications.
To do that, open a document under Saved, then hit the Upload icon at the top. You can then give it a title and choose a folder and a label, if you have them set up.
Search
One nice thing about this is that it will OCR your uploaded documents. For example, here is a search for a word that appears in one of the documents that I scanned using the iPad’s camera. It found it right away and, as a nice touch, showed a zoom to where the word appears.
Share
By hitting the Share icon, you then have pretty sophisticated options for how to share your documents and who to share them with. You can even create a time limit.
Organization And More
There are more things you can do in the iPad app including moving documents around, using tags/labels, saving them locally so that you have them when you don’t have network access, and print to an AirPrint printer.
If you are interested in using the OfficeDrop web service, the iPad app is a pretty good companion.
Any OfficeDrop users? I’d love to hear how you like it in the comments.
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Tip for OfficeDrop: You might want to pre-populate users’ accounts with a few files like Dropbox does so they have something to see at first. ↩
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For completeness’ sake, I am also writing this from Starbucks, but this time I am sitting beside two women arguing about whether Michael Jackson’s doctor should go to jail or not. ↩
