Thanks to a new partnership with Adobe, Dropbox now makes it easier to edit PDFs from the cloud, among other improvements.
Dropbox may not be among the top productivity suites, but it's gradually getting better through new partnerships that enhance its offerings. Last year, for instance, Dropbox teamed up with Microsoft to simplify opening and editing Office documents from mobile devices.
A new partnership with Adobe now takes things to the next level, making PDFs far easier to handle from the cloud. More specifically, Adobe users get quick access to their documents stored on Dropbox and can also edit those files on the go on mobile, without the need to download and re-upload the file in question.
According to the cloud storage service, PDFs are the most common business file types, and Dropbox has north of 18 million in its trove. With Dropbox users storing increasingly more PDFs, Dropbox wanted to make it easier to work with PDFs straight from the cloud, with little to no hassle.
"Ultimately, we want you to be able to work with any kind of file easily, from viewing to editing to sharing. Our collaboration with Adobe, the inventor of the PDF, is the next step in this process," Dropbox explains in a new company blog post.
From now on, users on PCs and Macs will be able to add their Dropbox account from the desktop versions of Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader and access the PDFs stored in their Dropbox straight from the desktop apps.
This represents the first stage of this new partnership, but Dropbox promised to add deeper mobile integrations in the next few months. For instance, mobile users will soon be able to comment and annotate on Dropbox-stored PDFs from their smartphone or tablet using the Acrobat Reader mobile app. This functionality will hit iOS in the following months and become available for Android next year.
The new partnership between Dropbox and Adobe will also allow for seamless syncing so users can quickly share their work regardless of whether they edited a Dropbox-stored PDF from their computer or their mobile device. Any changes made will instantly save to Dropbox so the PDFs will update across all platforms.
To take advantage of this new integration on the computer, users can either update their existing version of Acrobat or download the latest desktop app for free.
