Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

Here are some of our posts from this week in years past.

2010

• Fantastic Dropbox Tip Collection
  You can never get enough Dropbox tips. Most would apply to other file syncing services such as SugarSync too.

• What Is The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1100?
  Pro-tip: over the past few years, new ScanSnap scanners have been released in Japan earlier than in North America. Thus was the case with the ScanSnap S1100. I was pretty amazed when I first saw it online.

• Review: Take Control Of Your Paperless Office By Joe Kissell
  Wow, hard to believe it has been a year since this great eBook has been released. Still excellent.

2009

• Fujitsu ScanSnap Update For Mac OSX Snow Leopard Now Available

• ABBYY FineReader For ScanSnap Update For Snow Leopard OSX 10.6 Now Available
  It was a bit of a mess for Mac ScanSnap users when Snow Leopard was released, but eventually everything was fixed up.

• Amazon Kindle Comes To Canada!
  It was just two years ago that the Kindle finally was available to us Canadians. Now if only the Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire would follow suit.

(Photo by Ayleen Gaspar)

For those of you that have been following DocumentSnap for a while, you may have noticed that this year has seen a slight shift in the way I try to help you go paperless.

In addition to the free blog, newsletter, and video content, I have released some targeted guides on specific topics that I have heard readers have had some trouble with.

I have had fantastic feedback on these guides, but I’ve always wished I could do more to help more of you actually get started on your paperless project.

With this in mind, I’m happy to announce that my final project for 2011 is now live: the Paperless Action Plan. This project is a four-week class that is focused specifically on helping you create an end-to-end, customized action plan for going paperless, as well as helping you sort out what you need to do to put your plan into action.

Learn more or register here.

This launch is strictly limited to 8 days only (aka, until October 12). After that, the registration will be closed.

What It Is

Great question. The Paperless Action Plan has four action-focused lessons over four weeks. I know that everyone learns differently, so each week we will have:

• A live teleclass with Q&A time where I cover the material.
• Downloadable PDFs with the important takeaways.
• Recorded MP3 files so you can listen (or re-listen) to the lessons at your convenience.
• Worksheets and handouts so you can put the lessons into action.

  There is also a special members-only forum where you can ask me and the other class members questions about your situation, so you can get the best strategy.

  At the end of the four weeks, you will have everything you need to put together your own paperless action plan, and know exactly what to do to accomplish it.

Who it Is For

You want to go paperless, but are not sure where to start. You are tired of looking all over the Internet for bits and pieces of information and would like to just have everything consolidated in one place. You need more help than just organizing your documents. You’ve read and read, but haven’t done much to get going.

How do you keep the physical paper in your life under control? How do you organize and keep everything safe? How do you stay on track? How do you convince the people around you that you’re not crazy for doing this?

Who It Is Not For

The Paperless Action Plan won’t review every single scanner, software, and backup option. We will share our experiences and recommendations if you want them, but this is not a review.

It is also not for you if you just want to buy it, download the materials, and not do anything with it. No guide or piece of software is going to “go paperless” for you. At the end of the day, you have to actually do the stuff outlined. If you are not at the place to be able to do that yet, this may not be for you.

That’s it! I have never done anything quite this audacious before, so it should be fun. Hopefully speak to you soon on the first call.

Here’s the link again if you are interested in learning more.

In case you haven’t heard, Mozy, one of the main players in online backup, has discontinued their unlimited backup plan, moving to plans based on usage and the number of computers that you have.

Now, for $5.99 you get 50 GB for one computer, or for $9.99/month you can use 125 GB for up to three computers.

For your average home user just backing up some documents and photos, this may not make much of a difference, but more heavy users are going to be hit with a big increase.

Needless to say, other online backup vendors are having a field day with this. Carbonite is welcoming new subscribers on Twitter and Crashplan is running a special 15% discount for Mozy users.

If you are caught up in Mozygate and want to switch, Lifehacker has posted the best, most affordable alternatives to Mozy for unlimited backups.

What do you think of all this? Is it the first step towards the end of unlimited online backup? If you’re a Mozy subscriber, are you jumping ship? Let us know what you’re doing in the comments.

(Photo by millicent_bystander)

Since I have been posting about software quite a bit lately, I thought I’d back up and talk about something just as important: your physical environment.

You want to strike a balance between having things clean and uncluttered, and having things close by when you need them. It’s a tough line: how can you have it so that things are out of your way but not so inconvenient that it becomes a hassle to get something done?

A few months ago I totally re-did my home office and for me at least, I have come up with a decent solution and hopefully some of you might find it useful.

About My Office

My home office is in the basement and is affectionately known as “the dungeon” because it is cold and there is not a huge amount of natural light.

There is a TV in it (as you will see), but we don’t use it much as we don’t have cable (yes we are one of those freak families). I have a Mac Mini hooked up to the TV running Plex that we use as a media center. Sometimes during the day I will have music playing on it, or when there is a webcast (or a hockey game) I want to watch, I will put it on the TV and work from the sofa.

First, A Confession

Before I go through my new office, I have a confession to make.

Are you familiar with the old saying “the cobbler’s children have no shoes?”. Well, that was pretty much the situation for the first year of DocumentSnap.

I had gone through and eliminated my entire filing cabinet of non-critical paper, but my workspace itself was pretty much a disaster.

Longtime readers might remember that I started going paperless because I moved and I was annoyed at having to move my filing cabinet that was bursting at the seams with paper. I swore I would never do that again, so I bought a ScanSnap and the rest is history.

One unfortunate side effect of that move is I somehow lost the legs of my desk. So here I present to you the workspace that DocumentSnap.com was born on:

Is that a gong show or what?

There’s a big inbox with paper all over the place, cords everywhere, a scanner and an all-in-one fighting for space, and the desk is being held up by boxes. What a nightmare.

The Office Redesign

I knew I had to do something, so I decided to start completely from scratch. I downloaded a room planner from Ikea, got out my tape measure, and went to work.

I had a few goals:

• Everything I needed to work with on a daily basis needed to be right at hand
• Anything I wasn’t currently working with needed to be hidden away
• I have a thing for the color red so I wanted to have at least one red wall

You can see from my desk, mission accomplished:

All that is on there is my computer, monitor, phone, and some drink coasters. Occasionally I will have a notebook and some note paper but that is it. I try to be disciplined about keeping stuff off the desk.

Here is a wide shot of the workspace. Can you guess what my favorite movie is?

Hmm, I wonder what is inside that cabinet.

You can see there is a number of sections. I have a tray for holding miscellaneous computer stuff, my ScanSnap S1300, my all-in-one, and some hanging file folders.

The hanging folders are important. Any paper that comes into my office that needs to be dealt with goes in there. There is an “inbox” folder, a “WIP” folder for things I am working on, a “To Scan” folder, and a “To Pay” folder. That’s it.

You might notice that there is no filing cabinet near my desk. This is completely intentional. I do have one, but it is hidden in the closet.

It is extremely, extremely rare that any paper gets filed into there, and there is none at all in the bottom two drawers.

I have some more pictures of the home office that you can see in this Flickr workspace set.

Still To Do

So far I am loving the change, but there are still some things to do. For starters, as I mentioned, the light isn’t the greatest. I think I need to improve that.

Also, its a bit boring. I need some art or something on the walls, especially above my desk. If anyone has suggestions for cool things to put there, leave a comment.

I hope this gives you some ideas. I certainly drew a lot of inspiration from workspaces that I found online. If you have any suggestions for improvements or have other cool workspaces, feel free to drop a comment and let us all know.

Back when I purchased my first ScanSnap, the precursor to the ScanSnap S1300, I came across this Macworld article by author Joe Kissell in which he outlined his paperless office. That article, and others like it, were a big inspiration when I started DocumentSnap. In fact, I used (many would say ripped off) the Applescript in that article for the Acrobat Applescript droplet that I posted back in 2008.

Since that article I have been following Joe’s stuff, including his recent excellent comparison of the aforementioned S1300 and the Doxie.

I mention all this to set up the fact that Joe Kissell knows his stuff when it comes to going paperless, and I was thrilled to learn that he was writing a new ebook: Take Control Of Your Paperless Office.

If you don’t want to read the rest of this review, here is my conclusion: If you are a Mac user wanting to go paperless, go buy it. It is a complete no-brainer at only $10. If you’re a Windows user, you may want to read the rest of the review to see if it is right for you.

The ebook is 118 pages and, like the rest of the Take Control series from TidBITS, it is written from a Mac users’ perspective. When I downloaded my copy I printed it (just kidding) and went through it right away.

You can read it from start to finish or jump to the section where your biggest pain-point is. At the start there is a handy “Quick Start” pages that tells you where to go for what.

The way I see it, Take Control Of Your Paperless Office is divided into a number of themes that are grouped together (note these are not the actual chapters, but just how I see the content):

Setting The Foundation

• The benefits of going paperless
• Why you might want things to be searchable and what that entails
• Why choosing storage is important
• How to stop paper in the first place

Choosing Scanner & Software

• What to look for in a scanner
• Describes different scanner models. All the models he lists are Mac compatible, but they mostly work with Windows too or have a Windows cousin
• Give his scanner recommendation
• Describes different Mac OCR and Document Management software
• Gives his software recommendation

Setting Things Up Right

• Setting your scanner and OCR software settings
• Choosing a naming and filing strategy
• Choosing how to get at your documents once they are filed

Physical Paper Workflow

• Pay attention to where your paper is
• Come up with a workflow
• What you should keep

Working Through A Backlog

• Prioritizing what is there
• Get outside help when needed

Avoiding Printing

• Do you really need to print?
• Signing documents without paper
• Faxing without paper

As you can see, it’s very comprehensive. It doesn’t just focus on a scanner or piece of software but the whole workflow from end to end, and each section is very well thought out.

I found myself nodding to myself throughout the whole thing, and I especially liked his approach to naming and filing documents. You can tell that this ebook comes from his personal experience. Since Joe is an American living in Paris, I have a mental image of him sitting there eating a baguette and drinking a cafe creme while he does his scanning.

As I mentioned, Take Control Of Your Paperless Office is written from a Mac users’ perspective. However, since the majority of the content is workflow based, I would think that Windows users would benefit from it as well. If that is you, you’ll just have to ignore the software sections.

Is the ebook worth it? If you are a Mac user and don’t want to spend hours web surfing and trying to figure out the best way to go paperless, I strongly recommend Take Control Of Your Paperless Office. It’s a steal at $10. If you are a Windows user, I personally think it is still worth it, as long as you don’t need specific software recommendations.

Buy Take Control Of Your Paperless Office By Joe Kissell

A few months ago I wrote about ScanDrop, a piece of software from the folks at OfficeDrop that lets you use your ScanSnap or TWAIN scanner to scan straight to cloud-based systems like Evernote, Google Docs, or (obviously), OfficeDrop.

On the OfficeDrop blog, the company posted an analysis of the times that people on the East Coast are using ScanDrop to scan their documents. They wanted to see what time is the most popular time to scan.

A little more detail on how we conducted this research – this is based only on East Coast Time Zone users of ScanDrop software over the past two months. This was done to make the data easier to analyze. We also have data for the rest of the US, Europe and Japan, so it will be fun to compare different regions’ scanning habits. We will do this in a later post.

I’ll let you check out the graph in the post to see what times are the winners, but it is funny how there is a small blip at 3:00am. You crazy night-owls.

For the record, I do the bulk of my scanning on Wednesdays in the late afternoon or evening, Pacific Standard Time.

How about you, do you have a set time to do scanning, or is it a random or ongoing thing?

(Photo by nicksarebi)

Sometimes you just want a way to get text out of an image, whether it is a PDF you’ve downloaded, a document you want to scan, or even one from your digital camera or smartphone.

There are a number of ways to do this, but one free way on Windows is to use TopOCR.

As their site says, TopOCR was developed by a team of university mathematicians and it was primarily designed to handle documents captured by a digital camera or smartphone.

Input

For input, it will take any image file (JPEG, TIFF, GIF and BMP).

If you have a scanner that supports TWAIN, it will interface with your scanner and scan right into TopOCR.

Since TopOCR will only take image files, if you have an existing PDF that you want to OCR, you have to do some backflips.

Performing OCR On An Existing PDF In TopOCR

You’re going to have to do some copy & paste action.

First in Acrobat Reader, got to Edit > Preferences, click on General, and set “Use fixed resolution for Snapshot took images” to 300 pixels/inch. Hit OK.

Now load up the PDF you want to OCR, and go Tools > Select & Zoom > Snapshot Tool.

Highlight the part of the PDF you want to OCR, and the Snapshot Tool will put it to the clipboard.

Now to go TopOCR and paste. In the Image Window, you’ll see your PDF. In the Text Window it will automatically (and quickly!) OCR the text.

All this c&p stuff is only needed if you have an existing PDF that you want to OCR. If you have an image or a document in your TWAIN scanner, it’s not necessary.

Exporting The Text

Once you have the text the way you like it, you can save it as TXT or as a searchable PDF.

There is also a pretty unique feature. You can convert the text to speech and save it as an MP3.

There is a lot more to TopOCR, especially around the settings to clean up images from a camera. If you have a need for something like that, it is worth checking out, especially for the price (free!).

Do you have another free OCR solution that you use? Leave a note in the comments.

The folks over at Lifehacker are running one of their famous High Five calls for submissions, this time about readers’ favorite OCR tools.

OCR tools have been around for decades, but only recently have they been affordable (in many instances free) and accessible to people outside of government and corporate offices. This week we want to hear about your favorite OCR tool and what features make it so good at converting hard-copy print into machine-readable and editable text.

So, if you have a favorite program (or want to see what others are suggesting), head on over and have your say.

(Photo by: Laineys Repetoire)

One common comment about Evernote is that the service is awesome, but people wish that it supported encryption of notes or notebooks. To address this, Evernote introduced the ability to encrypt text inside a note, but for those that want something a bit more comprehensive, here is a 2 part guide on how to encrypt Evernote.

Today we’ll look at Microsoft Windows, and tomorrow how to encrypt Evernote on Mac OSX.

Encrypting Text Inside A Note

The “official” way to do encryption in Evernote is to simply encrypt any sensitive text in a note. This is easily done in the Evernote UI

Step 1: Select the text you want to Encrypt.

Step 2: Right-click and choose Encrypt Selected Text.

Step 3: Make up a passphrase that you will later use to decrypt this text. Note: This phrase is never sent to Evernote’s servers, and they have no way of retrieving it for you. If you forget it, you are out of luck. Also, this text can not be decrypted in mobile or web Evernote – just in the Windows client.

Step 4: Your text will now show as encrypted in Evernote. To decrypt it, click it and enter your passphrase from Step 3.

Encrypting Your Evernote Database

OK, it’s time to get a little geeky. Evernote itself does not support database encryption, so we are going to use a free program called TrueCrypt to make an encrypted drive that Windows will treat like any other drive or USB key. The difference is, whatever you save to it will be encrypted.
We’re then going to tell Evernote to put our files in there instead of the C: drive.
Ready? Let’s do it!
Note: This involves moving your Evernote files. If you’re not comfortable with that, I recommend you do not proceed. I’m not responsible in the unlikely event that your Evernote files are lost or something.
Step 1: Download and install TrueCrypt. Go to http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads and download the latest Windows version. Save it to your hard drive and install it.
Step 2: Start up TrueCrypt. You’ll see a blank list of drive letters. Click Create Volume.

Step 3: Hit Next for Create an Encrypted File Container and Next for Standard TrueCrypt Volume.
Step 4: Hit Select File and choose where on your hard drive you want your TrueCrypt image to be saved. You can think of it as a container that you are going to put other files into. For simplicity, I will put it on the Desktop and call it EvernoteVolume.

After hitting Save, hit Next when you are back at the Wizard.
Step 5: Choose the type of encryption you want. If you’re not sure, the default should be fine. Just hit Next
Step 6: Enter the size you want your new TrueCrypt drive to be. Obviously you will want to make this somewhat bigger than your existing Evernote database to allow for growth. To find out what your existing database size is, go to Tools and then Options in Evernote and then hit Open Database Folder.
Mine is about 77 Megs so I will put 150 Megs for my TrueCrypt volume. Why not. Hit Next.

Step 7: Enter a volume password that will be used when you mount this drive. It doesn’t make sense to go to all this trouble of encrypting Evernote and then choosing a weak password, so choose a good one. Hit Next.
Step 8: If you know that you need to change the Volume Format, do so here. Otherwise try the defaults.
Step 9: Hit OK and then Exit. You’ve got a TrueCrypt volume! Yeah!!
Step 10: Go back to your main TrueCrypt window where all the drive letters are. Pick which drive letter you will want to use. For this example I will use N, but use what you want.
Step 11: Click Select File and navigate to the file you specified back in Step 4.

Step 12: Hit Mount and enter the password that you created in Step 7.
Step 13: Check your Windows Explorer. You now have a new drive! Yeah!

Step 14: At long last, go into Evernote and got to Tools and then Options. Click Change to change the location of your Evernote files.
Step 15: Navigate to your N drive, or whatever drive letter you chose in Step 10. Hit OK. Evernote will now move all of its files to your new, encrypted drive.

You’re done! Awesome job!
One thing to note about this – from this point forward, you will need to have your TrueCrypt drive mounted before you start Evernote – otherwise Evernote won’t be able to find its files!
Over at 40Tech they have a handy TrueCrypt/Evernote batch file that might make this easier for you. I have not tried it myself, but give it a go if you’d like.
Do you have any other tips for encrypting your Evernote files? Leave them in the comments.

As you may know, when I want to OCR a bunch of PDFs at once as part of my scanning workflow, I use an Applescript droplet to have Adobe Acrobat OCR the files.

The other day I came across this blog post from Jonathan Bowman over at Adobe. He shows how to use a feature of Acrobat that I didn’t notice before: Batch Processing.

He has screenshots showing how it works, but I thought I would put together this video that shows how I set it up.

The nice thing about it is the process is pretty much the same whether you use Mac or PC.

By the way, there are a ton of things you can use Batch Processing for, not just making PDFs searchable. I will definitely be poking around in there.

Do you use Acrobat Batch Processing for anything?