We started renovating an old factory building into apartments last week and the owner saw a document and wanted a copy. He pulled out his Android phone, snapped a few photos and mentioned this great app that scans, stitches and creates PDFs on the fly.

He’s an older fellow, defined as anyone born before me, and could certainly retire if he chose. I love that he’s working hard developing projects (with his son) and teaching me things about technology. Color me impressed.

So I downloaded the free app, CamScanner -Phone PDF Creator, and found lots to like. It’s been downloaded 30M times and has almost a 5 star rating. That tells me it’s going to work and be simple to use.

I could immediately take a photo of a business card, email it to myself and save it as a PDF. Regular page photos also turned into nice scans. There is a batch scan ability, where multiple photos could be taken, say of a large blueprint, then stitched together into one file. I didn’t figure out how to get that to work yet.

As Groucho Marx would say, “It’s so easy a five year old child can do it. Somebody go get me a five year old child.”

So I’ll continue to struggle to learn. One helpful change I’ve made recently is updating to Adobe Acrobat 10 (actually Adobe Acrobat X). I had been using the 7.0 version and really like the improvements made in the last few years. If you’re trying to move towards less paper and more mobility, upgrade. By the way, the Standard version works fine, I didn’t see any reason to pay extra for the Pro.