Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

In the most recent issue of the DocumentSnap newsletter, I briefly mentioned the newest version of the Productive Macs bundle.

It was very popular with DocumentSnap readers last year (and I bought it too), so I highlighted a few apps that are included this year.

I received an email from awesome DocumentSnap reader (and recent Mac switcher) Jim asking more about the bundle, and whether I am buying it this year.

First, The Bundle

If you are a new Mac user, you may not be familiar with the concept of bundles. They are essentially a bunch of different applications sold together at a heavily reduced price.

Usually there are a few well-known applications, some “meh” ones, and some that no one has ever heard of.

The Productive Macs bundle is (surprise, surprise) focused on productivity applications. I am not going to list or go through them all, you can see the list on their site.

In the newsletter, like last year, I pointed out a few applications that I thought might apply to a paperless workflow. As Jim pointed out, I didn’t do a very good job of describing why they might help, so I will attempt to do so here:

• LaunchBar: This is the biggie. Nearly every well-known Mac-nerd blogger uses and loves LaunchBar. David Sparks and Katie Floyd from Mac Power Users talk about it all the time (and did even before they were a sponsor), and you will find that many, many power-users use it. In a paperless workflow, you can do a ton of stuff with it but moving & naming files, launching applications, opening files with other applications, and generally tying together everything on your Mac is what LaunchBar does.
• Default Folder X: When you are saving your files, this replaces the normal Save dialog box, and makes it much faster to save to favorite folders. It also lets you apply OpenMeta tags for you taggers out there.
• Tags: Tags by CaseApps is more or less the premiere application for working with, applying, and searching on OpenMeta tags. A good one for, again, you taggers out there.

There are other applications that don’t have anything to do with paperless workflows like the much-loved Fantastical and BusyCal that make this bundle a pretty good one. Many people feel, and I agree, that LaunchBar and Fantastical together make this one a no-brainer.

So, Am I Buying It?

The second half of Jim’s question was whether or not I am buying it. To be honest, I am not sure yet. Taking everything I just wrote into account, there are a few factors:

• While LaunchBar is (rightfully) much-loved, I have already started using Alfred, and like it a lot. Since I have already paid for and started unlocking the power of another launcher, I am not sure I have the time or energy to switch.
• For my calendaring, I personally use Google Calendar in the browser and am reasonably happy with it. I don’t currently use iCal, which means that Fantastical and BusyCal don’t do much for me right now, as great as they are.
• I do use OpenMeta tagging, so Default Folder X and Tags are tempting, but I currently use Yep for that.

With all that in mind, I haven’t decided whether I want to drop the $40 for this bundle for me personally. If I do, it would probably be future-proofing myself for a possible LaunchBar switch, for when I do start using iCal, or want to start using OpenMeta tags more effectively.

Do I Recommend You Buy It?

You need to evaluate your own uses, but if you aren’t already wedded to another application launcher and use iCal, I would say yes. As I said before, LaunchBar and Fantastical alone make this bundle worth it.

If you buy it using this link, you’ll be buying me a coffee so thank you for that.

If you use any of the applications in this bundle, I’d love to hear your thoughts about them in the comments.

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My dad is really into genealogy, and I know a lot of DocumentSnap readers are too.

I’m always interested in the technology behind tracking down your family history, so it is no surprise that I took notice of this post: Introduction to OneNote For Genealogists.

I know that Microsoft OneNote definitely has fans in the paperless crowd, so if you are interested in the topic, check out BrianB’s post and watch his helpful video, which I’ve embedded below.

Are you into paperless genealogy? How do you do it?

(Photo by MikeLove)

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This is Day 4 in a 12 Day series: 12 Days Of Paperless Gifts. If you know someone who could use some help going paperless, or if you deserve to treat yourself, this is the place. If you don’t, feel free to ignore this series. Normal DocumentSnap posts will still be coming!

If your special someone (or if you are your own special someone) doesn’t want the hassle of dealing with documents locally, or if you want an easy secure place in the cloud to store documents, an online document management service might be just the thing for Festivus.

Some services let you mail in documents for them to scan, but all allow you to capture information with your scanner, your email, or even with your mobile device, and then you can let them do the heavy lifting of making it searchable and available.

There are three main players:

Evernote Premium

Evernote Premium is for a user who might benefit from one of these features:

• Make PDFs Searchable: Uploaded PDFs that are not already OCR’ed will be made searchable by Evernote’s magic OCR technology.
• More Upload Capacity: If you know a real Evernote power user, the Premium account will let you upload 1 Gig a month.
• Offline Mobile Notebooks: In the mobile apps, Premium users can set notebooks to offline access, an important feature if you are ever without a data signal.
• Sharing & Security: There are more sharing options and collaboration options.
• Where can I learn more?
  Evernote.com

OfficeDrop

• Who is it for?: People who primarily deal with all types of documents but don’t specifically need local sync capabilities.
• Any cool extras?: They’ve released ScanDrop for Mac and for Windows, an application that lets you scan to cloud-based services like Google Docs and Evernote.
• Where can I learn more?
  OfficeDrop.com

Shoeboxed

• Who is it for?: People who deal with business cards and receipts on a regular basis and want help managing them. People who want to scan receipts and export them to accounting software or Excel.
• Any cool extras?: They’ve released a cool free iPhone app to let you take pictures of a business card and have it stored in your account.
• Do you have a review?: I’m glad you asked. Here is my Shoeboxed review
• Where can I learn more?
  Shoeboxed.com

This video on FileCenter naming rules is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

FileCenter by Lucion is a great document management application for Windows.

This video goes through one of the more useful features: Naming Rules. Aside from saving you some typing by automatically naming your files, naming rules are great because they can help to enforce your naming conventions.

Consistently named files + decent search = paperless happiness.

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.

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I have written a number of times about the built-in Preview in Mac OS X (or Preview.app to Mac nerds). It is a pretty great tool for working with paperless documents, and the price (free) doesn’t hurt either.

With the release of Lion, Apple has a cool new feature that is relevant to us paperless types – the ability to capture and use your signature (hat tip to awesome DocumentSnap reader Ron who told me about this way back before I had Lion installed).

You know the drill. You download or receive a PDF form, and you have to print it, sign it, scan it (or worse, fax it), and send it back.

That isn’t as bad of a workflow as it used to be, and I’ve written a few times (here and here for example) about how you can do that. However, the Lion Preview update makes it so that you don’t even need a scanner. Here is how it works.

Capture Your Signature

Fire up Preview and hit the Annotations button on the toolbar (the one that looks like a pen).

Then hit the Signature button, and choose Create Signature from FaceTime Camera (Built-in)…

I suspect that if you have an external camera hooked up you could use that too, but I haven’t tried that myself.

Then grab a piece of paper and write your signature. I have found that using thicker ink (like a gel pen) works best, but ballpoint will probably be fine.

You will feel like a bit of a goof doing this, but hold up the piece of paper to your Mac’s camera. Move it closer until your signature is taking up the box and the bottom is touching the blue line (don’t worry about the fact that your signature looks backwards).

Once it is touching the blue line, you’ll see a preview of what your signature will look like. Pretty cool right?[1]

When it looks good, hit Accept.

Use Your Signature

That’s great that Preview can capture your signature, but what can you do with it?

For starters, when you click on the Signature button in the Annotations toolbar, you should now see your captured signature like this:

To use it, click on your signature and then move the mouse cursor to the signature line in your PDF. Click, and you’ll see your signature there on the page.

Use the mouse cursor to move the signature to just the right place, and you can click and drag on the the circles around the edge of the signature to resize it.

When you have it the way that you like it, hit the Annotations button again and the circles will be gone. Your signature is now in the document.

My Thoughts

You can, of course, use this for anything else you can capture with your camera, not just signatures. Be creative and come up with other ideas.

One possible downside of Lion’s implementation of this feature is that it is black & white only. If you want to capture your signature in, say, blue pen, you’ll want to use another tool. I use PDFPen for that personally.

How about you? Do you “sign” your documents with a scanned signature? How do you do it?

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

When you view a PDF in Evernote, it will helpfully display the contents of said PDF so that you can see it without having to open up the file.

This is helpful, except when the PDF is extra large or your computer is extra slow. There are some other disadvantages too.

I’ve written about this feature before, but here is how it works in video form.

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.

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Back in early 2011, I wrote a post outlining how to scan to the OmniFocus Inbox. I am not an OmniFocus user myself, so the content of the post came via a helpful reader, Jos van de Voort van de Kleij.

It turns out that since that post, Jos has switched[1] from OmniFocus to Cultured Code’s Things, and wants to try to replicate the workflow as much as possible with his ScanSnap.

To accomplish this, Jos is looking for some Applescript help. Since I am neither a Things user nor an Applescript guru, I thought I’d post Jos’ plea here, and see if anyone has any ideas. If you do, feel free to comment here. Sounds like a fun project.

In Things my current workflow for ticklers is that I scan to Cloudapp (which works wonderfully by setting up a profile on the ScanSnap). Cloudapp places the url for the document on the clipboard. I then open a new task in Things, I copy the url in the notes section and schedule the task when I need to see it in the future.

That works wonderfully but: It would be so nice if I could put a document in the scanner and I would end up in an action in Things that I only need to schedule.

So I would need some Applescript to do that for me. Anyone out there that could help write the script??

I could set a profile on the scanner that scans to a folder. Then a folder script should copy the file to Cloudapp, wait for Cloudapp to finish uploading, then open a new action in Things and copy the Cloudapp url from the clipboard to the notes section.

As the ScanSnap can scan to the Cloudapp directly, any more elegant workflow using that would be fine too.

Any Mac geeks want to take a crack at this?

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This video on renaming files with TextExpander and Breevy is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

When you are going paperless, one thing you often do over and over is type filenames (or note names if you are using something like Evernote).

A text expansion tool like TextExpander for the Mac or Breevy for Windows can massively speed up this process. The keystrokes saved can really add up over time.

This video takes you through some of the ways that a text expansion tool can help you when going paperless.

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.

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I have used application launchers on my Mac for quite a few years, going back to the old Quicksilver days[1] , but I have to admit that I have mainly used them to (you guessed it), launch applications.

When Quicksilver went on its hiatus, I decided to look for an alternative, and started using Alfred. It quickly became my go-to application for launching applications and files on my Mac, but when I purchased the Powerpack, I decided I’d better start getting my money’s worth and learn how to do as much as possible with it.

It occurred to me the other day that using Alfred to search Evernote would be really useful, so I started trying to figure out how to do that.

I was not at all surprised to find that Stephen Millard over at Thought Asylum has already done the hard work for us. He has a series of two blog posts in which he shows how to search Evernote from Alfred.

Since one of his commenters added a much-appreciated tweak to the workflow, I thought I’d do my runthrough for how I set it up using Stephen’s instructions.

Get Alfred

Alfred is a free application, but in order to do what we are going to be going to be doing here, I believe that you will need to purchase the Powerpack. At the time of writing, it is 12 GBP.

The Powerpack does way more than what we’ll be talking about here, and if you want to use Alfred for doing more than just launching files, I highly recommend it.

Get the Evernote Extension

In Stephen’s second blog post, he provides an Alfred Evernote extension that you can download. However, I recommend the modification that Thought Asylum reader Pontus Sundén put together. You can download Pontus’ extension here.

Pontus’ modification works the same, but the search results appear in the existing Evernote window and do not pop up a new one. I personally prefer having everything in one window, but go whichever way makes the most sense to you.

Download either extension to your computer and remember where you saved it, because you’ll need it in the next step. In my example, I will save it to my desktop.

Add The Extension To Alfred

To add the extension to Alfred, first go into Preferences by clicking on the Alfred icon in your menu bar and choosing Preferences.

From there, click on the Extensions tab.

Drag the extension file that you downloaded previously on to the Alfred window like this.

Give the extension a name if you want it to be something other than “Search Evernote”. Then hit Import.

From there, a window will pop up that might look a bit scary, but don’t worry. You don’t need to think about 99% of it, if any at all.

First, on the left hand side, you will now notice that under Applescripts you will have Search Evernote added. That’s great, it means that it imported.

Next, you will see the Keyword field. You can change this if you want. That is what tells Alfred that you want to kick off an Evernote search. We’ll show how this works soon, but in the meantime you can either leave it as just en (Pontus’ default), or change it to something else. Stephen’s default was $en, so do what you want here.

When you are done, you are good to go. It is time to close the Preferences window and try searching!

Search Evernote From Alfred

When I type the Alfred keystroke to start a search[2], the search box will pop up. First, I type the little keyword code that we set in the previous section, which in my case is just en.

You can see that it brings up a few things, but in my case, all I care about is the first entry which is the Search Evernote option that we had created. Yeah! It shows up!

When I hit Space, it will know that I want to use the first option, so after that, anything I type will be sent directly to Evernote for searching.

Let’s try a simple Evernote search for a tag.

When I hit Enter, it starts up my Evernote client (I didn’t have it running), and does a search for anything with the tag cocktail in my Evernote account.

Let’s say I wanted to search for the instruction manual for my garage storage shelves, and I remembered I had bought it at Costco.

Et voila…

As far as I have found, you can type pretty much any Evernote search term into Alfred and it will carry over.

I’ve found integrating Evernote searching into Alfred to be super-helpful. Thanks to Stephen and Pontus for their great extensions and instructions.

Do you have any other great Alfred (or other application launcher) tricks for going paperless? I’d love to hear them in the comments.

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Yesterday I was reading a pretty hilarious press release by OfficeDrop about how they’ve been growing like crazy since switching focus from a mail-in scanning service to being focused on mobile apps and the online, connected office.

As I was reading, it occurred to me that I have never actually taken a look at the company’s mobile apps, and since they recently released a big update to their iPad app, there’s no time like the present.

Get An Account

In order to use their iPad app, you need an OfficeDrop account. Fortunately, they have a good free plan, so head on over to OfficeDrop.com and sign up.

There are paid plans too of course, but for our purposes we’ll start with the free one.

Get The iPad App

The OfficeDrop iPad app is free, so get it from the App Store.

When you first launch it, you are prompted to sign up for an OfficeDrop account, but since we have already created one, hit the Login link at the bottom.

When you first login, you are prompted with a list of your files in OfficeDrop. If, like me, you’ve just signed up for an account, that will obviously be blank.[1]

Put Stuff Into The iPad App

There are a bunch of different ways that you can get documents into the iPad app.

Save From Email

If you have email attachments, if you tap and hold on the icon in an email, you will be prompted to “Open In” an application (most likely iBooks), and then there will be another option that says Open In…. If you tap that, you’ll have the ability to choose which application to open the PDF in.

Choose OfficeDrop and it will open the document in the iPad app.

Save From Almost Any App

That Open In functionality isn’t limited to just mail attachments. Almost any application that stores PDFs will allow you to tap and hold to bring up the Open In menu. OfficeDrop should be in there iPad-wide.

Email Files In

OfficeDrop allows you to email files in to the service, and they will appear in the OfficeDrop iPad app.

To find your email address, click on the Settings icon at the bottom of the app, and you will see your address there. Handily, they’ll even add it to your Contacts if you’d like.

For example, I emailed this PDF to my OfficeDrop address and here it is in the iPad app.

Attach From Camera Roll

If you already have images in your iPad’s Camera Roll, you can attach them in the app.

Scan Documents

If you have an iPad 2, it has a camera. And if you have a camera on an iOS device, you have a document scanner!

As has been well documented, the iPad 2’s camera isn’t the greatest, but it can get the job done. Here’s a color scan that I did with the OfficeDrop app and the iPad 2’s camera.

One nitpick I have is that when you use the camera to scan the document, the app will let you crop the scan (which is good), but it will only do the crop in a rectangle. It would be better if it worked similar to other iOS scanning apps where you can tailor the crop to the inevitably weird shape of the camera’s picture.[2]

Doing Something With The Documents

Of course, just adding documents into the app isn’t going to do you much good. You want to be able to do something with them.

Upload

In the Saved section of the app, you can upload your documents to the OfficeDrop site. This will allow you to access your documents from a browser or any of the company’s other applications.

To do that, open a document under Saved, then hit the Upload icon at the top. You can then give it a title and choose a folder and a label, if you have them set up.

Search

One nice thing about this is that it will OCR your uploaded documents. For example, here is a search for a word that appears in one of the documents that I scanned using the iPad’s camera. It found it right away and, as a nice touch, showed a zoom to where the word appears.

Share

By hitting the Share icon, you then have pretty sophisticated options for how to share your documents and who to share them with. You can even create a time limit.

Organization And More

There are more things you can do in the iPad app including moving documents around, using tags/labels, saving them locally so that you have them when you don’t have network access, and print to an AirPrint printer.

If you are interested in using the OfficeDrop web service, the iPad app is a pretty good companion.

Any OfficeDrop users? I’d love to hear how you like it in the comments.

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