PDF organizer Stack is the latest app to hit the Google graveyard

A product of Google’s Area 120 incubator, Stack was one of those overlooked gems that was just, well, useful: it allowed you to create or import PDFs and store them in different categories that it called Stacks: tax, insurance, medical, etc. The app would pick up data from the PDF to suggest a title, add searchable details like the date of the document, the amount (if it was a receipt), or the organization that issued it, and there was also a field to add notes.

According to Google’s support page, Stack’s “functionality has been incorporated into the Google Drive app.” As someone who used Stack to save and then easily locate a number of PDFs that I needed quick access to, I could argue with that, but hey — it isn’t as if Google isn’t known for its graveyard of abandoned apps.

If you’ve been using Stack to create and track your PDFs, you’re going to want to move some — or all — of your documents. Google suggests that you move them to Google Drive and has incorporated a feature into Stack to make that an easy two-step process:

When you go to Drive, you’ll find a folder labeled Stack Export; all your PDFs will be within that folder. Unfortunately, if you’re a Stack user and you’ve been carefully categorizing and labeling your PDFs, you’ll find it was wasted effort — the folder will simply contain all the PDFs with none of the categorization or additional text included.

If you don’t want to keep your documents in Drive, the easiest thing to do is to send them all to Drive and move them out from there. However, you can also export them from Stack wherever you’d like; it’s just a more arduous method:

Once you’ve moved your PDFs out of Stack, you can go to the app’s Settings > Delete page to get rid of all those carefully organized documents.

Finally, from someone who really liked this particular app: thanks a lot, Google.