DocumentSnap

You may remember that a few months ago I did a how to make a $20 book scanner post. What I did not know then, but I do now thanks to awesome DocumentSnap reader Luke from Australia, is that there is a whole vibrant community around building and using DIY book scanners. The main site [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Whether you are wanting to create an executive summary for a document, or you just want to get the gist of a long document before diving in, wouldn’t it be helpful if your computer could do the skimming for you? The Mac OSX operating system and Microsoft Word on Windows have little-known summarizing tools that [...]

Recently I wrote about how to combine PDF files using Mac OSX, so today I’d like to give Windows the same treatment. 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 [...]

A close friend of mine is currently doing a year long round-the-world trip. Being the sucker nice guy that I am, I have agreed to receive her mail and keep her important documents for her. Sometimes I have situations where I need to scan stuff for her and send them electronically. Usually my trusty ScanSnap [...]

Recently in the DocumentSnap newsletter I wrote about how I am going through a bunch of my old magazines, scanning in just the articles I want and recycling the rest. Here is how I am doing it: 1. Cut out the pages from the magazine 2. Scan the article with my Fujitsu ScanSnap directly into [...]

Coming up on two years ago (yikes) I did a post in which I had helped a DocumentSnap reader use his Fujitsu ScanSnap to scan into Microsoft OneNote 2007. 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 [...]

As anyone who has read DocumentSnap for any length of time knows, I’m a bit of a fan of Evernote. Recently Brett Kelly at Bridging The Nerd Gap has released an 80+ page guide to Evernote called Evernote Essentials. At first you might think that Evernote is a pretty simple application (you put stuff in, [...]

If you are a Windows user and already have Microsoft Office XP through 2007, chances are you already have the ability to OCR documents to get the text out of them. 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 [...]