Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

A while ago, Evernote teased that they had a big announcement coming, and today they held an event to break the news.  Their new App directory, the Evernote Trunk, is now live.

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.

Using the Kelly Clarkson quote was just way too easy, I know.  This post is not in fact about American Idol winners, but is about Hazel, a Mac-only rules-based file management application.  It does a ton of stuff, but today I am going to talk about how you can use it in a paperless workflow.

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.

The other day I was having a conversation with a consulting client, and we got to talking about things to do with your paper before you scan it.

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

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?

I was just talking from Tim over at Dokix Inc. He’s the guy behind Home Document Manager, which I have written about before.

He let me know that his product PDF Scan Pro, which is a Windows program that takes documents from your scanner and converts them to searchable PDFs (with a bunch of document manipulation capabilities too), is on a huge sale at Bits Du Jour.

For one day only, Friday April 30, it’s on for $23.03 instead of the normal $49.

If you want to take advantage of the deal, go here.

If you’re reading this after April 30, 2010, no problem. Just go straight to the PDF Scan Pro website and pick it up at the full price.

Note that I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but I just wanted to get this out before Friday in case anyone wants to take advantage of the deal. Tim’s a good guy.

Here’s a demo video:

PDF Scan Pro from Dokix on Vimeo.

If you pick up PDF Scan Pro, leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Most of you know that I typically use Macs more than Windows, but in the process of doing some consulting work (more on that later), I have been spending more time using the Windows programs that come with the Fujitsu ScanSnap.

For starters, I want to say that I really like ScanSnap Organizer. I wish the ScanSnap came with a Mac version. However, I came across what to me was a pretty weird issue.

I went to search some of my scanned-in PDFs and the Search box was greyed out!

After doing some digging, I found out why. It turns out that surprisingly, ScanSnap Organizer doesn’t have PDF searching capabilities of its own. It needs to use either Adobe Acrobat or Windows Desktop Search.

For ScanSnap S1300 users on Windows XP (raising hand), this is a bit of a problem because Adobe Acrobat doesn’t come with the scanner.

So, here is what you need to do:

If You Use Windows Vista Or Windows 7

You shouldn’t have this problem because Windows 7 and Vista have Windows Search built in.

So, you can use either the built in Windows Search, or if you have a ScanSnap S1500, you can use Adobe Acrobat that comes with the scanner.

If You Use Windows XP

You can download the appropriate version of Windows Search 4.0 here.

If you don’t want to use Windows Search, you’ll have to use Adobe Acrobat. If you have a ScanSnap S1500 you’re set as it comes with Acobat. If not, you’ll need to get your hands on Adobe Acrobat 7.0 or later to search within ScanSnap Organizer.

More details on all this can be found if you search ScanSnap Organizer Help for “File Search”.

For the S1300 peeps who have Windows Vista or Windows 7, can you confirm that ScanSnap Organizer search is not greyed out for you without Acrobat installed? Please leave a comment and let us know.

Photo by jaaron

In my line of work (that is to say, hanging out in my basement) I don’t get a lot of business cards. Since I’ve had a few questions recently about which software to use for business cards, I thought I’d throw it out to you guys to see if you have any favorite software/workflow.

So, what do you use to scan and store business cards? Do you send them to a contact management system or just OCR them to search later?

Leave a comment and share your wisdom!

Mark Frauenfelder of MAKE and Boing Boing fame has a good post over on the Creditbloggers blog comparing his experience using both the ScanSnap S1500 and Shoeboxed to store his paper records digitally.

Which is better? As usual it depends on you and your personality type and the time you have available, but I’ll let you read the article yourself to get Mark’s take.

Are you more of a DIY-er, or would you rather have someone else deal with all your stuff?

In the comments to my ScanSnap S1300 review post, user pendolino asked about the Fujitsu ScanSnap 1300‘s performance, not so much the scanner itself, but the software and OCR process afterwards.

i would like to know a bit more about the very interesting sounding OCR feature that you say is bundled within the software (both mac and win) and, from your screenshot, seems to be different and separate from Adobe Acrobat. how fast does it OCR a B&W page of standard text? does it do it seamlessly? is it heavy on a Mac CPU slowing down other running applications, etc?

I couldn’t think of a better way to answer this question than to do a video of scanning and OCRing a document, so that’s what I did.

Now, obviously a lot of this depends on the computer.  I am doing this on a slightly old MacBook Pro with a 2.5 GHZ Core 2 Duo processor and 4 Gigs of RAM.  It’s going to be different for you if you have Windows, or different specs, or whatever, but hopefully this will give you an idea.

Hope this helps!

I recently had a DocumentSnap reader send this question in, but since I am travelling at the moment I thought I’d open it up for the rest of you to chime in. Here is the question:

I’m trying to find a solution for a paperless office….for customer contracts
and other documents…

We need to scan but we need to find a storage based application that is online
with some of the same abilities that you would want to see in the doc manager
that comes with a ScanSnap. I was thinking Evernote was an option, but how
easy it that to use, and secure data across different user groups.

As we all know, I am a big Evernote fan, but I just thought I’d open it up for your input. What sort of online document management solutions do you recommend for businesses that have good user controls?