Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

This video on using a highlighter with a Fujitsu ScanSnap to extract keywords is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

The ScanSnap has a cool but (in my opinion) underused feature where you can use a highlighter on some text on a piece of paper, and then ScanSnap Manager will extract that text as keywords and embed them in the PDF file.

I wrote about doing this with Hazel on the Mac before, but here is how the keyword process works in video format. It works on both Mac and Windows with 2009-or-later ScanSnaps like the ScanSnap S1500, S1500M, S1300, or S1100.

By the way, I forgot to mention in the video, this works best on black & white documents. If a document is too busy or colorful, the scanner will get confused and won’t be able to isolate the keywords.

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.

(Photo by planetofsuccess.com/blog/)

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This video on redacting sensitive text with PDFPen is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

In the spirit of full disclosure, the subject for this video was ripped off from an ad that Katie Floyd did on the Mac Power Users podcast.

If you have sensitive text in a PDF that you don’t want someone to see (think account numbers, amounts, names), many people just use an annotation tool to put a rectangle over it.

The problem with this approach is that it is not actually removing the text from the PDF, it is just covering it up. If someone gets the document, they can get at the text “behind” the image.

This video uses PDFPen’s great redact tool to remove all evidence of a piece of text from a PDF. You can even remove all instances of text with one command.

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.

Oh, and apologies to the Boston Bruins fans out there. All in good fun.

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This video on copying files to Dropbox in Windows 7 is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

There are two things that you need to know about this video:

1. The tip itself is completely ripped off from this CNET article by Ed Rhee
2. It could really apply to SugarSync, not just Dropbox, or any other folder on your computer.

If you have a Windows folder that you are constantly copying documents to, you can add it to your Send To menu for quick right-click access. This video shows you how.

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.

(Photo by mikes rite)

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

You’ve probably heard of sync software like Dropbox or SugarSync, but might not be sure how they work or what exactly they can do for you.

Hopefully, this video will help. I go through some scenarios where sync can help you go paperless, and some things to watch out for.

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.

(Photo by eggy_)

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

If you use [Evernote][evernote], you owe it to yourself to learn these keyboard shortcuts. They’ll make things go much, much faster. I especially love the search one.

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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This video on inserting your signature with PDFPen is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

There are a bunch of ways to add your signature to a document without printing it, but my favorite is using PDFPen by Smile Software. This video shows you how to do it easily.

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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This video on Seeding CrashPlan Backups is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

If you are using CrashPlan to back up to a remote drive (either on your network or across the Internet), you can really speed up your initial backup by copying all the files to the drive while it is attached to your comput first.

This video shows you how to seed that initial backup, and then attach the seeded drive to the remote computer.

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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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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This video on stopping the Fujitsu ScanSnap from prompting you is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

Often when you scan with the ScanSnap, it prompts to you set the filename and folder. This can be handy because you can get everything done in one step and don’t need to mess around with the file after.

However, if you are scanning a bunch of documents at once, it can really slow you down. This video shows you how to disable the popup so that your scans go right into a folder, and you can deal with the files later.

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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This video on CrashPlan Backup Frequency is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

Online backup services are great because they run in the background and you don’t need to think about it.

However, sometimes you want to have some control over when and how often the backup runs. In this video, I run through the backup settings of CrashPlan, the service that I personally use.

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.