When using an online service for going paperless, the ability to get your stuff out of the system is as important as what you can do in the system.

You don’t want a situation where you upload all your documents somewhere and then if you decide to leave the service, you can’t.

Recently I wrote about how to export your data out of Evernote, and now OfficeDrop, an online scanning and digital filing system, has written a blog post outlining how to get your data out should you choose to.

Whether you are cancelling your account or just need to get your documents out of our cloud and onto your desktop, there are 3 easy ways to move your files from OfficeDrop to your computer. As always, no matter how you download your documents, they will always retain their text-searchable PDF format.

You can read the blog post for more information, but the three options they currently provide are:

1. Download the documents
2. Request a DVD copy of your account
3. Request a link to a zip file of your account contents that you can download (this happens automatically if you cancel).

I really like companies being upfront about how to cancel and get your stuff out rather than hiding it. Nice work OfficeDrop.

Related posts:

1. Pixily Changes Names – Is Now OfficeDrop
2. Pixily Provides Storage Online and via USB, DVD, or Hard Drive
3. Scan To Google Docs With ScanDrop

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)

Related posts:

1. Using Microsoft Office Document Imaging To OCR For Free
2. Your Votes: Best Online Document Storage Solution?
3. Using Mac OSX Preview To Password Protect Your Documents

Of course, there are a huge number of applications out there that will do this, and if I had any brains I’d point you to some expensive one that would get me a referral fee.

However I never claimed to be smart, so like the Mac tutorial, I am going to point you to some free and open source ways to do this.

In the Mac tutorial, I limited myself to exclusively using functionality that was part of the operating system. I couldn’t find the equivalent in Windows, so if I have missed something obvious please let me know in the comments.

With all that said, let’s check out two free and open source ways to combine PDFs in Microsoft Windows: PDF Split and Merge and pdftk.

PDF Split and Merge

PDF Split and Merge (aka PDFsam) is a Java application that comes in two versions: basic (free) and enhanced (requires forum membership and a donation of at least 1 Euro).

As the name implies, the application can do a number of PDF manipulation functions including splitting and (wait for it) merging. We’re going to focus on the merging part.

I don’t know what it is with open source software, but 9 times out of 10 the terminology/workflow that they use isn’t intuitive at all to a civilian.

To start with, you need to chose a Plugin. So, we’re going to choose the Merge/Extract plugin.

Then we’ll click the Add button and add the files that we want to combine (click the image to make it bigger). You then have a chance to change the order if you’d like.

Once you have your files how you want them, go down to the bottom of the screen and either type or hit Browse to select your destination file/folder.

When you are ready to roll, hit the Run button. When it finishes, you will have the combined PDF file.

pdftk

If working in the command line is more your style, pdftk is definitely for you. I love their description of it:

If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents.

pdftk can do a whole assortment of PDF tools, but again we’ll be focusing on merging documents.

It’s pretty simple. Download pdftk, unzip the .exe file somewhere, go to the directory where your documents are, and issue a command similar to this:

pdftk Scan.pdf Scan1.pdf cat output Combinedpdftk.pdf

Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

Et voila, here is the output:

I could have also just thrown everything together into one PDF:

pdftk *.pdf cat output Combinedpdftk.pdf

As you can see, pdftk is a pretty powerful little application that [can do a lot more than what I have described here][6]. I’ll be writing more on it in the future.

So, these have been two free ways to combine PDFs on Windows. Do you have another method that you like? Let us know in the comments.

Related posts:

1. How To Combine PDF Files in Mac OSX Using Automator To Make A Service
2. Using Microsoft Office Document Imaging To OCR For Free
3. How To Encrypt Evernote On Microsoft Windows

Sometimes I have situations where I need to scan stuff for her and send them electronically. Usually my trusty ScanSnap S1300 does the job, but there is the occasional situation where I have to use my flatbed.

However, what happens when I have multiple PDFs that really should go in one document? I needed a way to combine the PDFs together.

There are a million ways to do this, including some I have talked about before like using Preview.app to drag and drop pages, and there are lots of applications that one can use to combine PDFs, but I wanted to do something that would be:

• Already built into the OS and not require any additional software
• Easy to use
• Repeatable so I only have to set it up once and can use it again and again

I came across this great tutorial by George Harito that runs through how to use Automator to create a Service in Snow Leopard to combine PDFs for you. If you don’t know what the heck that means, don’t worry about it. I’ll take you through step by step.

(In case you’re wondering why I don’t just point to George’s tutorial and be done with it, it’s because there are some extra unneeded steps in there that might confuse some people, so I decided to recreate it here. The inspiration comes from George though and he deserves all the credit).

Create The Service

We’re going to be using an application called Automator to set this up. It looks a bit scary but don’t worry, what we’ll be doing is very easy.

Start Automator

• In Finder, go to Applications and then start Automator, the cool little robot icon

Choose Service

• In the window that pops up, highlight Service and then hit Choose

Set Up The PDF Action

• At the top in the middle, you will see a line that says Service receives selected and then a dropdown. Choose PDF files

• In the Library section on the left, you’ll see a line for PDF. Choose that
• In the next column over, there is an option for Combine PDF Pages. Click that and drag it into the the section on the right

Now we want to be able to give our new PDF a name.

• Go to the Library section and choose Files & Folders and drag Rename Finder Items to the canvas under your Combine PDF Pages
• It is going to ask you this: This action will change the names of the Finder items passed into it. Would you like to add a Copy Finder Items action so that the copies are changed and your originals are preserved?. You almost certainly want to hit Don’t Add because you want it to rename the file, not make a copy.
• We want to totally rename the file, so choose Name Single Item
• At the bottom, click on Options and then check Show this action when the workflow runs. It will then prompt you for a name for your new PDF when you run it.

So now we’ve told it to combine the PDFs and give it a name, but now we need to tell it where to put the new file.

• In the Library, still in Files & Folders, drag Move Finder Items to the canvas under your previous action
• You can leave the default location if you want, but click on Options and then check Show this action when the workflow runs. That way, it will ask you where you want to save your new PDF.

Here is the whole rule. Click to embiggen.

Awesome! You’re done. Now go File | Save As and give it a name like Combine PDF Files.

Using the Service

So why did we go through all this trouble to set it up as a Service?

Now any time I ever want to combine a bunch of PDFs, I just need to go to Finder, right click them, and check out the new option that I have:

When I choose Combine PDFs, I get a popup where I give it a name.

Then, another popup appears where I choose where it save it.

Et voila, I have my combined PDF with the 3 files that I had selected in the Finder.

From now on it will be super easy to combine any PDFs.

How about you?

What tricks/processes do you have for combining PDFs on the Mac? Leave a note in the comments or on the Facebook page.

Related posts:

1. Updated: Acrobat Applescript for ScanSnap OCR
2. How To Export Your Data Out Of Evernote
3. How To Encrypt Evernote On Mac OSX

I know that OneNote is a popular program, but I had never actually used it myself other than a few minutes at Gnomedex 2005 when Robert Scoble was extolling its’ virtues on his tablet.

I decided to rectify that, so I downloaded a trial of Microsoft OneNote 2010 and decided to try setting it up with my ScanSnap S1300 and see how it works.

Creating A Notebook

OneNote uses the concept of Notebooks to store notes in. When you first install it there is a Personal notebook, but I decided to create a notebook called Documents.

This might not make sense for you- you might want your scanned documents to spread amongst other notebooks, but for simplicity I’ll put them all in one.

OneNote 2010 allows you to create a Web notebook that you can share. I won’t be doing that here but look into it if it is something interesting to you.

Setting Up Sections

Inside each Notebook, you can set up different sections for categorization purposes. In this example, I’m going to set up sections for Home, Tax, Kids, and Office. Set up whatever makes sense to you, of course.

Putting Stuff Into OneNote

When you click on the Insert menu item, you can see that there are a whole bunch of ways to get information into OneNote, whether by attaching files, recording audio or video, using a screen clipper, or by using a File Printout.

You can also drag a file in to the OneNote application itself.

Don’t Hit That Scanner Button

If you are using a ScanSnap, you might be tempted by the siren song of that Scanner Printout button.

Since the ScanSnap doesn’t support TWAIN, it’s not going to work in your case. What we need to do is set it up from the ScanSnap Manager side.

Setting Up ScanSnap Manager

When you install OneNote, it creates a special Printer Driver called Send To OneNote 2010 (this will vary based on your version of course). What we are going to do is create a ScanSnap Manager Profile to scan to that Printer.

To set this up:

• Right-click on the ScanSnap icon in your tray and choose Scan Button Settings
• Click on the Profile box and choose Add Profile. Call it something like Scan To OneNote
• On the Application tab, choose Scan To Print (click to embiggen)

• If you don’t want to keep a copy of the PDF in the directory specified on the Save tab, hit the Application Settings button
• Set the rest of your quality, duplexing, etc. options as desired.

Scan Away

Now when you hit the scan button using your ScanSnap, it will pop up the printer dialog box. Choose your Send To OneNote 2010 printer, and it will scan it right into OneNote.

You can then move the document into whichever Notebook/Section you want.

Once you do that, your note will be created (click image to embiggen).

What About OCR?

Good question. Luckily, OneNote will do the OCR for you.

I couldn’t possibly do a better job outlining this than this article at How-To Geek so head over there and check out all the ways that you can use OCR in Microsoft OneNote.

From my initial assessments, Microsoft OneNote 2010 seems like a pretty cool tool for managing both your documents and your information in general.

Having said that, I am not sure what it is like once you get into hardcore use. If you have thoughts or experiences one way or the other on OneNote, drop a comment below and let us know.

Related posts:

1. Using Microsoft Office Document Imaging To OCR For Free
2. Fujitsu Releases Cross-Platform ScanSnap S1300 .. Yeah!
3. What Is XPS And Why Should You Care?

It’s called Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI). I’m not going to lie, what I am about to show you is not exactly the best way to OCR documents. If you have software that came with your scanner, I’d stick to that.

However, if you don’t already have OCR software and all you want to do is get some text out of an image, the software you already have is better than nothing at all.

Finding Microsoft Office Document Imaging

First, you want to check to see if you already have it installed. In Office 2007, go to Start > Programs > Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office Tools, and you should see Microsoft Office Document Imaging.

If you don’t see it there, never fear. It’s an optional part of the Office install. In Control Panel, go to Add/Remove Programs, select Microsoft Office, click Change, and then select add features. You will find MODI under Microsoft Office Tools. Install it and you should be good to go.

Ah Microsoft, I Love You

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Microsoft Office Document Imaging will not import PDFs (why would they support an Adobe product?!). It will only import TIFFs and Microsoft’s own Microsoft Document Imaging format (.MDI).

In this example, I’m going to assume that we want to get the text out of a PDF that has not been OCR’ed already. Sure you could use MODI to scan a document in, but I figure if you have the hardcopy document and a scanner, you’d probably just use the scanner’s software anyways.

Copying A PDF In

Since we can’t actually import a PDF, we’re going to do some copy & paste magic.

Open up your PDF in Acrobat Reader or whatever PDF reader you are using and either Select All or Select just the portion you want to OCR. Then hit Copy.

(By the way, that’s my picture of a Fung Wah bus that made it into New York Magazine. Aren’t you proud of me?).

Then switch to MODI, and you would think you would go Edit > Paste right? Of course not! This is Microsoft!

Instead go to Page and then Paste Page. Voila, the image you just copied is now in Microsoft Office Document Imaging.

Saving The Text

So now that you have the image in MODI, what do you do with it? To OCR the text, go Tools and then Recognize Text Using OCR.

You can then save it as a TIF (though I understand that only MODI can read that TIF), or MDI. Since that is more than a little useless, I’m going to cover sending the text to Word.

To send the text (and graphics, if you’d like) go up to Tools and then Send Text to Word. The OCR’ed text will then appear in a Word document with all the images at the bottom, if you checked the “Maintain Pictures in Output” box.

So, again, this is not the greatest OCR process in the whole world, but hey. If you’re a Windows user you probably already have Office, so it’s good to know what is available if you ever need it.

Photo: Naufragio

Related posts:

1. How To Encrypt Evernote On Microsoft Windows
2. Organize And Share Your Information With Shelfster (Free Invites)
3. Your Votes: Best Online Document Storage Solution?

Evernote has had an API for quite a while and a number of applications have had Evernote integration for some time (many of which have been covered here), but the Trunk (get it.. trunk? elephant? <drum fill>) brings everything together.

Right now at launch there are 100 items in the directory, some of which were integrations that already existed, and some of them are brand new.  We’re told that there are a lot more coming in the future.

To get to the Evernote Trunk, click on the new + sign up at the top of the Mac or Windows client (iPhone and iPad integration is coming soon).

Tools To Go Paperless

Like I said, right off the bat there are a ton of different items in the Trunk already, so I took a stroll through the directory to see what is there for going paperless:

• DocScanner is an iPhone app that can save to Evernote
• JotNot will take a picture of a document, correct it, and send it to Evernote
• Paperboy is a cool looking app (they talked about it in the presentation) that lets you take a picture of a part of a newspaper article and it will automagically put the text of the entire article in your Evernote
• ScanBizCards lets you take a picture of a business card and then add it to your contacts and Evernote
• OfficeDrop and Shoeboxed will let you mail documents to them, they’ll do the scanning for you, and the documents can then be saved to Evernote
• Nitro PDF Reader will save into Evernote
• PDFPen lets you annotate PDFs and save directly into Evernote
• The Canon ImageFormula P-150, the Fujitsu ScanSnap, Lexmark SmartSolution printers, and Doxie will all scan to Evernote

Now With Notebooks

I know what you’re thinking.  “Er, doesn’t Evernote already have notebooks?”.  Yes, yes it does.  But it didn’t have Notebooks (see that capital N there?).

This is something that could be pretty interesting.  Basically, the concept is that content producers like blogs and magazines can create custom branded Notebooks that Evernote users can subscribe to.

It’s a bit hard to explain without seeing it, so let’s use Make: magazine as an example.  In the Trunk, I will click on the Make:Projects Notebook.

Then I’ll add the “Make:Projects Toys and Games” Notebook to my Evernote account and Sync.

Now I have a Make:Projects notebook added in my Evernote, and 4 notes with different projects I can do (or kill myself trying)

Your New Brain?

Evernote’s CEO Phil Libin has said quite a few times that his vision for Evernote is to be your “electronic brain”, and I see the Evernote Trunk as one more step in that direction.  By bringing these apps together with Evernote as the glue between them, it becomes even more integrated into our workflows.  It will be interesting to see how this all plays out, and if publishers embrace the Notebook concept.

Related posts:

1. How To Export Your Data Out Of Evernote
2. How To Encrypt Evernote On Mac OSX
3. How To Encrypt Evernote On Microsoft Windows

To be honest, DocumentSnap readers have been mentioning Hazel to me for quite some time, but for whatever reason I have never gotten around to looking at it until now.  As usual, you guys are way smarter than I am.  Why on earth did I wait?

Basically, you can think of Hazel as something that brings iTunes Smart Playlist-like rules to the files on your Mac.

How can this help in a paperless workflow?  Well, for example, you could have Hazel watch a folder, and then anything that you drop into it could be tagged, Spotlight comments added, OCR’ed, and then sent to a specific folder.

David Sparks from MacSparky has a great runthrough on how he does this.  I definitely recommend checking it out.  He has a bunch of Hazel rules that get triggered when he names a file something, like “gas bill”.  As soon as he names a file “gas bill.pdf”, the Hazel rules kick in and it gets renamed with the appropriate date added, then it gets sent to a nested folder structure based on type and date.  Very cool stuff.

He also describes this workflow in episodes #3 and #25 of the Mac Power Users Podcast.

Hazel And Evernote

As I said, there are a bunch of different ways you can use for Hazel in a paperless workflow.  One that pops to mind is to create a rule that sends something to Evernote.  Lets say we scan or receive PDFs and want to send certain ones to Evernote.

In my example, I’ll create a folder under Documents called “ToEvernote”.

Then I will create a Hazel Rule called “Evernote Import” that watches that folder, and acts on any PDFs that I save there.

First I will create a condition that acts on any files with Extension PDF:

Then I will run an Applescript, so will choose “Run Applescript”.  I will leave as “embedded script” and then hit “Edit Script”

Then I will paste in the following code to that box:

tell application "Evernote"
activate
create note from file theFile
end tell

Then I will hit the Plus sign to add a new action.  Once a file has been added to Evernote, I don’t want to keep it around, so I trash it.  I choose Move File and then select the Trash folder.

Here is what my final rule looks like:

Now, as soon as I drag a PDF into that toEvernote folder, Evernote pops up with the new note and the PDF is trashed. Coolio!

Of course, you can get extremely fancy here, but between this post and David Sparks’, you should be well on your way to paperless fun with Hazel.

I’m rocking the 14 day free trial now, but I think I will be paying the $22 to buy the full version.  Great stuff.

Do you use Hazel? Have any tricks? Leave a note in the comments.

Related posts:

1. How To Encrypt Evernote On Mac OSX
2. How To Encrypt Evernote On Microsoft Windows
3. How To Export Your Data Out Of Evernote

I’ve written a lot about scanning documents and what to do after you scan them, but I haven’t written too much about document preparation.

One of the great things about a double-sided automatic document feeding scanner like the Fujitsu ScanSnap (and others) is that you can just throw a stack of paper in it, hit the scan button, and you are good to go.

This is great, but I have found that if you have a decent amount of paper coming in and want to have a more effective process in place, it helps to do a bit of preparation up front.

In case you are interested, here is what I do right now. I find that if I take a bit of extra time to organize before scanning, the scanning and processing part goes a lot more quickly.

• I have four profiles set up in ScanSnap Manager. They have changed slightly from this old ScanSnap Manager workflow post, but the basic concept is the same: Stack of Single, Stack of Double, Single All-in-One, and Double All-In-One.
• When I am ready to scan my stack of documents, I separate them out into piles that match the 4 profiles: a stack of single page documents that I only want to scan one side of, a stack of double sided single-sheet documents, a stack of multi-page single-sided documents, and a stack of multi-page double-sided documents
• Then I run the stacks through the scanner, choosing the appropriate ScanSnap Manager profile before each run.

By doing this document separation before running it through the scanner, I make the actual scanning process quick and easy, and also avoid scanning things like the fine print on the back of bills and statements that I don’t need and that waste space and OCR-ing time.

How about you, what kind of document preparation rituals do you have? Let us know in the comments so we can all get some ideas.

Image: ifindkarma

Related posts:

1. Getting Your Paper Ready To Scan
2. Fujitsu Releases Cross-Platform ScanSnap S1300 .. Yeah!
3. Your Votes: Best Online Document Storage Solution?

Once upon a time, it wasn’t Apple that Adobe was getting beat up by, it was our good friends at Microsoft.

They wanted to create a competing format to the ubiquitous PDF, so they created the XML Paper Specification (XPS). When I read that Home Document Manager now supports XPS files, it occurred to me that I hadn’t written about XPS on DocumentSnap before.

Go Open

Knowing that it would be pretty difficult to battle PDF with a Microsoft-only format, they did the smart thing and submitted it to ECMA to make it an open standard called OpenXPS.

They took it a step further and made it XML (OK XAML; stop being picky)-based which is a big bonus.

So What Is XPS?

Like PDF, XPS is a document format that is fixed-layout. As I mentioned, it is XML based, so the XML markup defines how the document will look when printed or viewed with an XPS viewer.

Wikipedia has a pretty thorough comparison of OpenXPS and PDF if you are wondering how the two stack up.

How Do I Create An XPS Document?

If you have Windows Vista or Windows 7, you’re in luck. OpenXPS support is built-in. All you need to do is go File > Print and choose the built-in XPS printer and you will be good to go.

If you use XP, you can download the MS XPS Essentials Pack that will let you do the same thing.

I haven’t found any free XPS writers for the Mac. If you know of one, leave it on the comments!

OK So.. Why Should I Care?

Well, at this point, you probably don’t. 99.999999% of the documents that you work with are going to be PDF. However, it’s always good to know what formats may or may not be on the horizon, and often over time the “more open” solution wins in technology. We’ll have to see whether that remains PDF or is XPS in the long term.

By the way, your next question might be “how do I scan to XPS with my ScanSnap?”. Patience, that is coming.

So.. what do you think? Any XPS fans in the house?

Related posts:

1. Your Votes: Best Online Document Storage Solution?
2. Why Is ScanSnap Organizer’s Search Box Greyed Out?
3. Using Mac OSX Preview To Password Protect Your Documents