You can now authorize Adobe Acrobat to access your PDFs on Dropbox.

You can now authorize Adobe Acrobat to access your PDFs on Dropbox.

Open, edit and save Dropbox files within Acrobat.

Open, edit and save Dropbox files within Acrobat.

Last May, in a post here, I reviewed the new Adobe Acrobat DC, the all-new version of the popular PDF software. (I also have a more extensive review in Law Practice magazine.) The “DC” in the name stands for Document Cloud and this latest version of Acrobat is designed to tightly integrate with the cloud, so users can access and manage PDF documents via the cloud using any device — computer, tablet or phone.

Toward this goal, Adobe conceived Acrobat DC to be agnostic about cloud storage platforms. Adobe provides its own document-storage platform, Document Cloud, but it wanted users to be able to access their PDFs from whatever document-storage platform they used.

When the product first came out earlier this year, it integrated with only one third-party site, SharePoint,  but Adobe said it would be adding connectors to OneDrive, Box and Dropbox.

This week, the Dropbox integration went live. Now, you can authorize Acrobat to access your Dropbox account. Once you do, you can open Dropbox PDFs from directly within Acrobat and save PDFs directly into Dropbox. The integration also works with Acrobat Reader.

So far, this works only with the desktop versions of Acrobat on Macs and PCs. Before the end of the year, Acrobat Reader’s iOS versions will be upgraded to allow the integration on iPhones and iPads. The integration on Android devices will be available sometime next year.

In addition to allowing you to directly open a file from Dropbox into Acrobat, the integration also allows you to directly attach a file from Dropbox to an email or export a PDF to a different file format, such as Microsoft Word.


Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.