Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

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

There is a feature of Windows 7 that people either love or hate: Snap. When you drag a window to the side or the top, Windows 7 will automatically resize it.

I personally like the feature a lot, but many people hate it. This video shows you how to turn it off, if you are in the latter camp.

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.

Are you a Snap lover or hater?

Join the forum discussion on this post

This video about splitting a PDF with Preview is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

If you have a Mac, you may not realize that you already have a way to extract pages from a PDF and split it up.

The Preview application (what you get when you double-click on a PDF or an image) that is built in to Mac OS X is surprisingly capable.

This tip is completely ripped off from Eddie Smith over at Practically Efficient, and while I have posted about it before, many people prefer video so here you go.

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 Orin Zebest)

Join the forum discussion on this post

This video on ScanSnap Organizer Keyword Distribution is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

The ScanSnap Organizer software that comes with all Windows Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners has an interesting feature that I’ll bet not many people have noticed: you can use keywords in a PDF to automatically file your documents.

You can either assign keywords to your PDFs manually, or use a highlighter and have the ScanSnap recognize them, but once you do, you can use Distribute By Keyword to create rules and then have them sort the PDFs into cabinets and folders.

As a bonus, like a bad 90’s sitcom, you can see me re-use some of the footage from last week’s ScanSnap highlighter video.

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.

Join the forum discussion on this post

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/)

Join the forum discussion on this post

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.

Join the forum discussion on this post

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)

Join the forum discussion on this post

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_)

Join the forum discussion on this post

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.

Join the forum discussion on this post

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.

Join the forum discussion on this post

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.

Join the forum discussion on this post