2011

• How Do You Track Payable Paperless Bills?
  One of the fears that people have when switching to paperless billing is that they’ll miss making a payment and… that happened to me. Some good suggestions in the commends.

• Avoid Scanner Rage – Prepare Your Documents
  I am a big believer in doing document preparation before scanning.

• Reader Story: Adding Amounts To Document Filenames
  Great reader story by Sophie Perrault. Putting the amount in the filename is clever.

2010

• iPad PDF Reading Roundup
  I wrote this before I had an iPad. For what it is worth, I tend to use GoodReader or sometimes just plain old iBooks.

(Photo by Ayleen Gaspar)

Related posts:

1. DocumentSnap Time Machine
2. DocumentSnap Time Machine
3. DocumentSnap Time Machine

Hi, I have been scanning my business and personal docs for years using a Xerox Documate 252; love it! Only problem is receipts on that slick paper jam the machine, so I have to tape them to a piece of paper. Was hoping I could find a clear sleeve to insert the receipt, scan it, then toss the receipt and reuse the sleeve. Have you found such a thing?

This is a great question and one that I suspect quite a few people run into.

I told Jody that I know the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 comes with a carrier sheet, and that you can buy a 5-Pack of ScanSnap carrier sheets separately.

The question was, would the ScanSnap sheets work with her Xerox?

She decided to take a risk and ordered them, and they worked very well. So, if your scanner is having trouble picking up certain types of paper, it may be worth your while to track down a carrier sheet. It worked for Jody.

Do you have a question relating to going paperless? To submit your questions to Ask DocumentSnap, hit the contact page and type your question. Please put “Ask DocumentSnap” somewhere in there.

(Photo by [F]oxymoron)

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Related posts:

1. Shoeboxed Review – Receipts, Business Cards, And Documents In The Cloud
2. Paperless Receipts
3. How I Used Expensify To Manage Receipts On The Road

This is particularly useful when you use a consistent, descriptive naming convention for your paperless documents.

This video shows you how to create a Smart Folder in Mac OS X to show files with a certain naming convention, and shows how you can create a Smart Folder to show your PDFs created in the past seven days.

View the video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube. If you are able to, I recommend that you watch it with HD turned on.

This video on creating Smart Folders on the Mac is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

Join the forum discussion on this post

Related posts:

1. Video: Tag Documents On The Mac With TagIt
2. Video: Create A Saved Search In Windows 7
3. Video: How To Use Evernote Import Folder To Automatically Add Files

You have always been able to e-mail documents in to the device, but in the past few months Amazon has released a helper application for Mac and Windows to make the process a little easier.

Adding Documents To The Kindle

The Send To Kindle application application adds three new ways to get PDFs on to your device. The screenshots in this section are for the Mac, but Windows works the same.

Drag To Dock (Mac Only)

When you install Send To Kindle, it adds the application to your Dock. To add a PDF, drag the file on to the dock icon.

Print To Kindle

The application adds a new printer called Send To Kindle. This lets you send a document to your Kindle from any application that can print.

On the Mac, I wish they had integrated it into the PDF menu like most other OS X applications instead of adding another Printer, but what’re you going to do?

Right-Click

You can now right-click (or Command-Click on the Mac), and there will be a new menu option for Send To Kindle. Where it is depends on your version of your operating system. On Mac OS X Lion it is buried under Services.

Sending To Kindle

However you do it, once you select a document to send to your Kindle, this pop-up will appear:

You can give the document a title and then are given the following options:

• Deliver via: Do you want to use Wi-Fi or 3G? I recommend going for Wi-Fi in most cases, which is the default.
• Deliver to: Which device to you want the document to appear on? You can choose your Kindle or any Kindle apps (for example, on iOS) that you have registered.
• Archive Document: If you check Archive document in your Kindle Library, the document will be stored on Amazon’s servers. You can then remove it from your device and re-download it later on any device. If you don’t check this option, the document will be downloaded just to the selected device once and will not be stored by Amazon.

Buried under the Options menu is an option to convert the document to Kindle format. It is up to you if you want to do this. Some of the formatting will probably get messed up, but one benefit is that it will save your reading position between devices.

Viewing Documents On Your Kindle

Once the upload is complete, the document should appear on your Kindle when it is connected to Wi-Fi. It usually happens within a few minutes.

As you can see[1], it will appear with your selected Title and Author, and will say new pdf.

If you regularly put documents on to your Kindle, the Send To Kindle application can be a time-saver. Do you keep PDFs on your eReader? How do you do it?

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Related posts:

1. Amazon Releases A New Kindle, Does Anyone Care?
2. Borrow Library Books On Your Kindle
3. How To Go Paperless With The Amazon Kindle (No, Not With Books)

2011

• Announcing the DocumentSnap Paperless Forum
  Did you know that there is a DocumentSnap Forum? Well now you do.

• What Do The Fujitsu ScanSnap Compression Settings Do?
  Nothing like a little settings experimentation.

2010

• What Is XPS And Why Should You Care?
  Does anyone actually use the XPS format?

• Lexmark SmartSolution – Lets Hear It For The All-In-Ones
  Some options for All-In-Ones.

(Photo by Ayleen Gaspar)

Related posts:

1. DocumentSnap Time Machine
2. DocumentSnap Time Machine
3. DocumentSnap Time Machine

We just celebrated Mother’s Day and since I have young kids I was lucky enough to get lots of school-made gifts sent home. My five year old put that her favorite thing I do for her is “let her watch a TV show after dinner.” Note she did not say, take care of her when she is sick, feed her dinner, or help her with her clothes every morning, nope TV. Sweet huh? Of all the stuff that goes into running my household that is what she loves the most. Clearly her world is pretty self-centered, as any self-respecting five year olds should be, and I am good with that. But it did get me thinking about the business of being a Mom.

It turns out that Moms are good at a lot of things (other than pressing the power button) and if they aren’t at first they improve out of pure necessity. Moms (no matter how free-spirited and relaxed) create systems and multi-task possibly better than some Fortune 500 CEOs. When I had my first baby.. well it was a mess. It took 2 hours to just get an 8lb baby out of the door. Then, like most Moms, I figured out systems and put them in place. Now I get three kids, five and under, dressed, fed and ready to leave every morning in less than an hour. My point being, that putting systems in place is something we know how to do. Unfortunately, I don’t think a lot of Moms enhance their systems by leveraging technology. Your house is a small business and we know that any business now would be crazy not to take advantage of the technology available.

There are many different technology tools out there, but I want to focus on going paperless with Evernote. I encourage you to put new systems in place, for example spend 10 minutes every Saturday scanning in anything in your scan pile.

Here are just a few examples of ways to use Evernote:

Important Documents
Like any business the flow of “business” related paperwork is pretty high. Bank statements, insurance, warranties, mortgages, taxes, birth certificates important receipts and kids artwork are just the first things that come to mind.

Medical Information
Running a home, means you need to have medical information on hand. Keep shot records, allergy lists and medication information for those unexpected medical moments.

Travel Planning
A family vacation is no simple task. You must find a place to stay, make travel plans and keep track of the paperwork. Not to mention the work to get everyone out the door. I keep all my lists with everything we need to get packed in Evernote. It is so easy to share notes I can send them over to my husband too.

Home/Property Management
Managing your home or multiple homes is a lot of work. However, there are massive amounts of time to be saved by tracking all your home information through a paperless system. You can put warranty info, appliance info, leases, paperwork, pictures, and repair contacts all in Evernote. This allows you to easily and promptly deal with any home situation that occurs.

Kids’ Activities Schedules
Kids should come with their own secretaries. Keeping up with their back and forth is exhausting. School schedules, sports information are all saved in Evernote. That way no matter where I am I can reference these events that we need to work around.

Businesses measure success by profit. I think in our business time is the profit. More time gained is less time stressed and freedom to be with our families.

(Photo by cogdogblog)

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Related posts:

1. Business Card Battle
2. Reader Question: What software do you use for Business Cards?
3. Shoeboxed Releases Business Card Scanner iPhone App

The latest version of the Mac client has an awesome new feature: the ability to save attachments to a folder. You can do this for an individual note, a group of notes, an entire notebook, or your entire Evernote database.

View the video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube. If you are able to, I recommend that you watch it with HD turned on.

This video on saving attachments in Evernote is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

Join the forum discussion on this post

Related posts:

1. Video: Export From Evernote
2. Video: How To Use Evernote Import Folder To Automatically Add Files
3. Video: How To View Evernote PDFs As Attachments

The service does a lot of Dropbox-y things, but I thought I would focus on one of the advertised features that is relevant to going paperless: the ability to OCR uploaded documents.

Note that this is not a comprehensive runthrough of Google Drive and I am not going to talk about privacy issues. As with any cloud service, you should be familiar with the company’s policies and decide for yourself whether you are comfortable with them having your data on their servers.

Setting Up Sync

Once you have enabled your Google Drive account, you then have the opportunity to download the Mac or Windows client. While installing, it will create a “Special Folder” on your computer.

If you are an existing Google Docs user, you may want to click the Advanced setup button on the next screen. There you can configure which of your existing Google Docs documents will get synchronized to your computer automatically.

Accessing Your Drive

Once the Google Drive application is installed and running, you will then have a special Google Drive folder. Some files may have been automatically copied to it.

If you have “non-Google Docs” files such as PDFs saved in Google Docs already, they will have downloaded. Depending on your settings, it may have also downloaded some .gdoc files as well. When you double-click them, you’ll be taken to your Google Drive on the web.

Uploading Documents To Google Drive

Uploading documents to Google Drive is as easy as copying them to the Google Drive folder on your computer. They’ll automatically be uploaded.

While uploading, they’ll have some blue arrows. For some reason when I dragged in two files at once, they were stacked on top of each other and I couldn’t separate them.

Once they were uploaded, they had green checkmarks and I was good to go.

Google Drive OCR

The PDFs that I copied to Google Drive were not searchable, but when I logged in to the web interface and typed a phrase from the PDF, it found it right away.

When I clicked on the document, I could see that it is now searchable and could find and highlight text.

Unfortunately, when I downloaded the PDF, it was the original non-searchable PDF. The text was not embedded. Oh well, can’t win them all.

Google sets limitations on what type of PDFs can be OCRed. You can read about them here.

OCR Quality

To test OCR quality, I did the same test as in my OCR Smackdown post. Here are the results:

The spreadsheet has become the virtual “slide rule” for CMAS. It’s used for everything from preliminary strategic plans to ñnancial statements. As with any familiar method, it finds its way into numerous situations where better alternatives are available, rnost significantly in its widespread use as a de facto reporting tool.
The appeal of the spreadsheet as the quickest Way to get a report out is not hard to appreciate. “Excel is probably the most comfortable environment for a lot of iìnancial professionals,” Alok Ajmera, vice­president, professional services with Mississauga, Ont.-based Prophix Software, says. “There’s a very little learning curve, you can effectively do whatever you want with the data, and it works fairly well in smaller organizations.”
Periodic and complex reporting in processes like revenue management or cost management, however, is where the spreadsheet model really starts to break down.

Already Searchable Documents

This is a weird one. You would think that if you uploaded a document that was already searchable, Google Drive’s search would use that text. Unfortunately, no.

I am not sure if this is a bug or by design, but people are complaining that Google Drive can’t find text in documents that were OCRed prior to uploading. I was able to replicate the behavior.

I really hope they fix this, because it makes things much less useful.

Wrap-Up

Google Drive’s OCR capabilities work more or less as advertised. Given some of the limitations, I am not sure that I would want to rely on the service for all my OCR or synchronization needs, but if you are already a heavy user of Google’s services and don’t already have a scanner with OCR capabilities, it is certainly better than nothing for the price.

Any Google Drive users out there? How do you like it for document storage?

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Related posts:

1. Video: How OCR And Searchable PDFs Work
2. PDFPen OCR Applescript To Automatically Make PDFs Searchable
3. Evernote Premium Now Makes PDFs Searchable

2011

• How To Make Spotlight Index Your Sparse Bundle
  If you have your documents stored in an encrypted sparse bundle on your Mac, you may need to do this to have Spotlight index them.

• GTD And Going Paperless – Filing Documents
  Awesome guest post by Alex Satrapa.

2010

• FineReader Mac Update For ScanSnap Works For Older ScanSnaps Too
  Not sure if this is still valid, but it was cool at the time.

• CrashPlan Is A Cross-Platform Backup Solution With Some Clever Options
  This was my first exposure to CrashPlan, which I now use for online and offsite backup.

(Photo by Ayleen Gaspar)

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1. How To Make Spotlight Index Your Sparse Bundle
2. DocumentSnap Time Machine
3. DocumentSnap Time Machine

He’s a lawyer, sure, but he also runs an incredibly useful website called MacSparky, and I am not just saying that because my iPhone’s home screen is Internet-famous there.

David is also one half of the dynamic duo that produces a podcast called Mac Power Users, and a recurring topic there is going paperless.

A while ago, I heard on the Twitter grapevine that he was working on a book about going paperless, and I was intrigued. Would it be a physical book like his last one, iPad At Work? Would it be an eBook in PDF format?

It turns out[1] that it was none of the above. David has created a multimedia guide that includes images, movies, and interactive elements. It is pretty crazy.

A few things to note before I go more into it:

1. It is iPad only. You need to have an iPad to read it, and you can only read it on the iPad.
2. It is pretty big. It includes 32 screencasts, and is around 800 Megs, so don’t be worried if it takes a while to download, and make sure that you have enough space on your device.
3. It is focused solely on going paperless with the Mac and iOS. No Windows, no Android, no HP Envy XYZ Secret Spectre UltraSuperBooks.
4. It is only $5!

If after that you want to ignore the rest of this post and buy it, head on over to the iBooks store.

Oh, a minor disclaimer: David was kind enough to link to DocumentSnap in the Appendix. I had no idea he was going to do that, and my review would be the same either way.

About The Content

Paperless starts with a discussion of why you might want to go paperless, and then jumps right in with a brief overview of a paperless workflow.

It then covers the following high-level topics:

• Capturing information using a scanner and a mobile device.
• Processing your information: naming it, storing it, and backing it up.
• Working with PDFs on your Mac and iPad

He then goes through his own personal workflow, which is helpful.

Even if you have never read MacSparky or listened to Mac Power Users, it will be very clear from reading this that David really knows his stuff. He has spent a lot of time thinking about his tools and workflow, and has tried to make it as efficient as possible.

One thing I like about the guide is that it is strongly infused with his opinion. If he thinks something should be done a certain way, or if he thinks doing something is a waste of time, he will say so.

There are some cases where I personally do things differently, but that is what is great about this stuff: there is no one right way to do it, and we all need to do what works for us.

About The Format

This is my first experience with an eBook created with the new iBooks Author that Apple released back in January, and I have to say: this is the future.

There are videos and interactive images embedded right in the book, so if you are reading about something and want to see how it works, you can just tap on the page and it will play the video for you right then and there. If you have an AppleTV, you can even stream the video using AirPlay and watch it on your TV. This is the sort of thing that books on a tablet[2] make possible.

Of course, as I mentioned earlier, this means that the downloads are quite large, and it means that you can only read it on your iPad. I know that some people may want to read it another way[3].

Should You Buy It?

If you use a Mac, have an iPad, and want a great guide to going paperless, I think David has hit it out of the park with Paperless. At only $5, it is definitely worth the money. I am really looking forward to seeing what other Field Guides he has cooking.

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Related posts:

1. Review: Take Control Of Your Paperless Office By Joe Kissell