Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

This post is part of the paperless stories feature at DocumentSnap. Some stories are from readers that have successfully gone paperless, some are still going through it. Would you like to share your story too?

Today’s featured DocumentSnap reader is Stacey Hurley.

What problems were you trying to solve by going paperless?

Years of papers unsorted and pretty much either stuffed in boxes to do later (read – never) or piled up all over our office. I knew I would have to tackle it all one day – probably while moving, but then we had 3 years of back taxes to file and the accountant needed papers I couldn’t provide because they were in that huge mess somewhere! That pretty much forced me to consider the problem and find a solution. We are also moving in about 6 months and will be living in our RV (and hopefully traveling) and I don’t want to have to pay storage fees for boxes of paper, when I can digitize 99% of them!

What were the biggest stumbling blocks?

How to get started! What to do first which took some time for researching on the web (that’s how I found you) and deciding what equipment and programs I would use. Then creating a workflow that was really attainable. I initially put all the papers on a large table loosely categorized. This was my starting point. Then I determined I wanted to purchase a ScanSnap S1300 and sign up for Evernote. My husband had asked me what I wanted for our anniversary so I told him I wanted a ScanSnap! Not the most romantic gift, but the peace of mind from a paperless office is a wonderful gift in and of itself. I love both the ScanSnap and Evernote program!

Tell us about your paperless workflow

I’m still in the initial stages, so right now I have 5 boxes labeled as follows: To Scan, To Shred, To File, School (I homeschool) and To Read. Every day I set a time for 15 minutes and do nothing but sort through my paper mountain and have thrown out tons of paper too! Then in the evenings when I have an hour to relax – I grab my ScanSnap, To Scan and To Shred box and put it on my bed and scan while I watch TV. Once the paper is scanned and tagged in Evernote, it goes into the To Shred box. At the end of the night, I take about 5-10 minutes and shred what’s in the box. I am slowly but surely seeing my pile shrinking and I can actually see and use my office desk again! Setting a timer makes the whole process less overwhelming and breaks it down into manageable chunks of time. Even a 5 minute time chunk can accomplish quite a bit. The trick is to stay on task and don’t do anything else – don’t read, answer the phone, or talk to anyone – just categorize and sort.

Thanks Stacey, that’s a great example of how taking doing a little bit at a time on a regular basis can stop a going paperless project from being overwhelming. Good luck in the RV! (PS- A ScanSnap sounds pretty romantic to me. ).

If you have questions for Stacey, leave a comment and I will try to get them answered.

As much as I like Evernote there is one thing that has always been a bit annoying: when you bring up a note that contains a PDF, it displays it inline. What do I mean by that? Here’s a screenshot:

As you can see, when you view the note, the contents of the PDF are displayed automatically.

If the document is a one pager it is not a big problem, but if you store large PDFs in a note, it can be a pain having to load the whole thing. Also, it is not as easy to get the file out if you want to send it somewhere.

Thankfully, Evernote has just released a new version of their Mac client that gives you the ability to choose how you want the PDF displayed.

If you have a PDF that is displaying inline, right-click/cmd-click and choose View As Attachment.

Once you can do that, the PDF will (surprise surprise) show as an attachment:

To set it back, right click and choose View Inline.

One bonus of having the PDF as an attachment: you can click on the icon an drag it out of Evernote like so:

(Special gold star for anyone that can identify the painting on my wallpaper based on that screenshot)

If you want to control the default behavior of all this, go to Evernote > Preferences > Clipping and you will see the dropdown to change the default:

All in all, a handy update for those using Evernote to store documents.

I have a theory, based on no data whatsoever, that Fujitsu is going to sell a lot of ScanSnap S1100 scanners to people who already have another ScanSnap.

Your average home or small business user will most likely not need multiple scanners, but I could see people who travel a lot, visit client sites, or hit trade shows benefiting from having the S1100 as their portable scanner while leaving their S1500, S1500M, or S1300 back at the office. At a sub-$200 price point, this lets them have a the best of both worlds: a fast and high powered dual sided scanner at the office, and a fast and mobile scanner on the go.

This got me thinking: how nicely does the S1100′s software play with other ScanSnaps? To find out, I’ve been running my ScanSnap S1300 with the S1100′s software for the past month or so on my Mac. A few notes about this not-at-all-scientific test:

• I’ve only been doing this heavily on my Mac. I assume Windows results are similar, but haven’t dug too deeply
• I don’t have a S1500 or S1500M, so while I assume results with those scanners are similar, I can only speak to the S1300 from first hand experience
• I have no clue what Fujitsu’s official policy is on running newer software with older scanners. If you ever need to contact Fujitsu support about something, they may (?) give you a hard time

Profile Migration

I was very happy to see that my old ScanSnap Manager profiles were carried over when I installed the S1100′s software. They also did this when I upgraded from the S300M to the S1300. This is a very nice touch for power users.

Scanning With Old Profiles

Scanning with my pre-S1100 profiles on the ScanSnap S1300 continued to work with no problems that I could see. You can see that the “scanning” progress window has a new look.

Scan To Evernote

One nice thing about the S1100 is that it will now scan directly to Evernote, meaning that you don’t need to do any ScanSnap Evernote integration tomfoolery. Is that a hardware or a software thing? Let’s find out.

In ScanSnap Manager there are two new options for the Application tab: Scan To Evernote (Document) and Scan To Evernote (Note).

In case you’re wondering what the difference is, Document will attach the scan as a PDF to a new note whereas Note will embed the pages as JPGs in new notes.

On the Scanning tab, with the S1300 turned on, you can see that we have the option for both double-sided and single-sided scanning.

Lets try scanning a double-sided document using Scan To Evernote (Document) on the S1300.

Hey look, it worked.

One interesting note, when I have the S1100 plugged in and turned on and go into that Scan To Evernote profile, on the Scanning Tab I now only have the option to scan single-sided.

Scan To Google Docs

Now let’s try to scan to Google Docs using the S1300. Here is the Application settings button of a new Scan To Google Docs profile I have created.

Looking good!

…and, there it is in Google Docs scanned with my ScanSnap S1300.

Scan With Both ScanSnaps Plugged In

What happens when you have both ScanSnaps plugged in and turned on at the same time? Will a hole open up in the space-time continuum?

Looks like those killjoys at Fujitsu were one step ahead of me.

So, there you go. As far as I can tell, as long as you are using only one ScanSnap at at time, using older models like the ScanSnap S1300 will work fine with the ScanSnap S1100′s software.

Have you tried running multi-ScanSnap? Let us know your experiences in the comments.

This post from is part of the paperless stories feature at DocumentSnap. Some stories are from readers that have successfully gone paperless, some are still going through it. Would you like to share your story too?

Today’s featured DocumentSnap reader is Brandon Smith from Keizer, OR. You can find him on Twitter @brasmi.

What problems were you trying to solve by going paperless?

My issue surrounded availability of paper documents in my file cabinet. I am a city councilor, so I get stacks of reports to read, and generally filed those in labeled folders in a cabinet. The problem is, those documents weren’t available unless I remembered to take the folder with me. I bought an iPad in April, and use the premium version of Evernote for document storage.

What were the biggest stumbling blocks you faced when going paperless?

Developing an easy-to-use system, along with a quality scanner.

Tell us about your paperless workflow

99% of my documents go through my ScanSnap S1300, then into a “to be shredded” box.

When the box reaches approximately 10 lbs, I take it to a local non-profit, Garten Foundation, which employs those with disabilities, and performs shredding services at a very reasonable rate.

Scanned documents automatically go into Evernote, where they are dated, titled and tagged for either immediate action or future reference. These documents are then available on my iPad or iPhone anytime thanks to support for offline notebooks.

Anything more we should know?

I am a husband and father, a member of the Keizer City Council, a workers compensation claims adjuster, and a 2/3-time college student, so organization is vital to meeting all of the demands of my time.

Thanks Brandon, the only thing I didn’t see in there is when you sleep. I love the idea of letting your shredding build up and then have a non-profit do it for you. If you have questions for Brandon about his workflow, leave them in the comments and I’ll try to get them answered for you.

One of the most frequent complaints that users who try to use Evernote to manage their documents have is that it had no concept of “sub-notebooks”. Yes you can fake it by using tags, and you could make the argument that if you rely on search, you don’t need sub-notebooks anyways, but the fact remains: people like their folder structures.

The company has clearly heard the feedback because they have just introduced a new feature: Evernote Stacks. At the time of writing, it is available in Evernote 4.1 for Windows and in Evernote 2.0 Beta for the Mac (Mac users, if you want to try it out, click on the “Update to Beta versions” checkbox in the Software Update tab of the Evernote for Mac preferences. Then, check for updates – remember that this is beta though!).

Are Stacks Sub-Notebooks?

Well, not exactly. They are, however, a way to organize your notebooks and give you a level of organization that you didn’t have before.

Let’s say that you have notebooks for “Home Maintenance”, “Home Documents”, and “Insurance”, and then you also have a small business and have a notebook for each of your clients. You can create stacks to organize these more effectively. Here is the “Before”:

Let’s start with organizing our home stuff. To create a new Home stack, you can either drag the Home Documents notebook onto the Home Maintenance notebook to create a new stack, or right click on Home Documents and choose Add to stack > New stack. Let’s drag it:

You can see we now have a new stack called “Notebook Stack”. Right-click on the new stack and choose Rename and call it “Home”.

Now that we have our new Home stack, I’ll drag Insurance into it. We’re well on our way to getting organized.

For the business ones, I am going to do the same thing and call the stack “Business”. You might think it would make more sense to create a Clients stack, right? I’ll discuss my decision in a bit.

There we go, we’re nice and organized. I can keep the Business one closed when I am doing my Home stuff, and vice versa.

Also, you can just search within a stack which is great.

From this point forward, if I want to create more Notebooks inside a stack, it is easy. I can just right-click on the stack and choose Create Notebook in… and it will create the notebook right in the stack.

Limitations of Stacks

Stacks is a great improvement over what was there before, but there are a few things to be aware of from using-Evernote-as-a-document-management perspective.

The first is that you can’t have a stack within a stack. So, for example, you can’t have a “Business” stack and then inside it have a “Client” stack and then inside it have your client notebooks. You will still need to do some playing with tags if you want to achieve that effect.

Also, keep in mind that stacks are just a visible representation of your notebooks. They are not true “sub-notebooks”. For example, you can’t have an “Insurance” notebook inside a Home stack and an “Insurance” notebook inside a Work stack. You’ll need to give them different names.

All in all, this is a great improvement to Evernote and I am looking forward to it coming to the Mac in non-Beta form and to the mobile versions.

Update: The ScanSnap S1100 has been released in North America as of January 2011. You can see my Fujitsu ScanSnap S1100 Review here.
Almost a year ago now, I noticed something on some Japanese gadget sites: a strange ScanSnap called the S1300. About a month or two later, it was announced in North America. Is history repeating itself? Today I came across yet another strange Japanese ScanSnap: the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1100.

It looks like Fujitsu is taking on the ultra-portable scanner market with a new model that is smaller than the aforementioned S1300.

My knowledge of Japanese consists of a phrase that ends with “Mr. Roboto”, but from what I have been able to piece together, it is 273mm (W) x 47.5mm (D) x 34mm (height).

One cool thing it can do is switch between “Straight Path” and “Continuous Path” feeding, so you can either have it flip over a document for dual-sided scanning, or feed paper, business cards, or even ID cards (a highly-requested feature) straight through without bending it.

It also looks like they are embracing the “cloud” and will have some sort of functionality to scan to Google Docs, Evernote, or Salesforce. It’ll be interesting to see how that works.

Fujitsu has a video on their site (11 Meg WMV format only, unfortunately) that you can see here. It’s in Japanese, but you get the idea.

I have no idea when/if the ScanSnap S1100 will be coming to North America (though I do have my theories). Stay tuned here and you will be the first to know.

I am always in awe of is the number of different platforms that Evernote supports. Having worked in software in the past, I can only imagine the product management headache that must cause.

Because of all their platforms, sometimes different versions start getting a bit long in the tooth and that was definitely the case for Evernote’s Windows client. Version 3.5 was good, but it definitely had some catching up to do.

Thankfully, last week the company dropped a big shiny new Windows update: Version 4.0.

The first benefit that 4.0 brings is speed. According to the company, the new version is a complete rewrite from the ground up. They say it starts five times faster and uses half the memory. I am not going to sit here with a stopwatch to test that claim, but it definitely feels much snappier to me.

UI Changes

While they were rewriting things anyways, they took the opportunity to clean up the UI.

They made things prettier and (in my opinion anyways) more functional. For example, they made it so that you can choose which type of note that you want to create right off the bat.

They also have made things cleaner by hiding the functons that you don’t need to see until you actually need to use them. For example, the search description is hidden until you click on it.

Also they cleverly hid the thumbnail size slider. It is invisible until you move your mouse down to the bottom of the thumbnail section.

Windows 7 Jump Street

If you’re on Windows 7 (which I finally am), you can use some of the new features such as geolocation and you can use Windows 7′s Jump Lists.

What is a Jump List? Yeah, I didn’t know either (what can I say, I’m usually a Mac guy).

When you click on the Evernote icon down in the task list, you can now do a bunch of Evernote functions right from there. Pretty cool.

Where’s The Search?

One thing that I find a bit weird is that you can’t search inside a note when you are viewing a note. Obviously when you do a general Evernote search, it will find and highlight the words. However, if you have a note open I can’t see a way to then search inside it. Hopefully they will add that soon.

There are a bunch of other improvements that you can read about in their blog post like improved clipping and editing.

If you’re a Windows Evernote user and are not sure whether to upgrade or not, I say go for it. If you tried Evernote in the past and didn’t like the UI or found it slow, it might be worth checking out again.

Have you tried 4.0 yet? How do you like it?

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 Evernote
3. Remove the pages that I don’t want from the article

The last step is strictly unnecessary, but for some reason it just bugs me having pages in the PDF that don’t belong.

This is a problem with magazines of course, because inevitably at least a few of the pages will have an advertisement or another article on the back side.

I’m going to step you through how I accomplish this. The example will be on the Mac using Preview.app, but you can do the same thing on Windows if you have a PDF editor.

Scan The Article Into Evernote

In this example I scanned a 4 page article, but there are actually 6 pages in the PDF: one from another article altogether, and the other an ad for “lifestyle franchises”.

Again there is no harm leaving them in, and it is probably not worth the time to remove them, but I just do it anyways.

Once in Evernote, open the PDF in Preview

Right click on the PDF in the note and choose “Open With” and choose Preview (or the PDF editor of your choice).

In Preview, remove the unwanted pages

In the sidebar on the right-hand side, go to the pages that you want to get rid of and hit Delete.

Save and exit back to Evernote

In your PDF editing application, save the file and then quit Preview.

Voila! Now when you open the note in Evernote, you’ll find that the PDF only has four pages. The other two are gonzo.

(Photo: limonada)

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, and search when you want to find something), but Brett does a good job of shining light on little known corners of the application and taking the reader through some use-cases.

I like to think of myself as somewhat of an Evernote ninja, but I was a bit ashamed at some of the stuff I didn’t know or had long forgotten. I’ll be implementing some of the tips (cough, global keystrokes, cough) into my workflow immediately.

It has some good points on how to use tagging effectively, setting up email filters (brilliant!), and using Evernote as a task management system.

Also, I wholeheartedly approve of any writing style that encompasses the use of the phrase “here’s your huckleberry”.

One minor nitpick I have is that when describing Evernote’s auto-import folder, it could have mentioned that that feature is Windows only so that Mac users don’t go hunting for it. That’s the only gap I could find however.

If you’re an advanced user that has been using Evernote for quite some time, there is a good chapter called “Regaining Control of Your Evernote Database”, something I personally could benefit from.

The price of Evernote Essentials is $25. For some that will be reasonable, for some it might seem high. Only you can make that determination.

One funny point. When Brett was 95% done writing the guide, he was actually hired by Evernote. In the Evernote Podcast, the guys were joking that in order to get a job at the company, you have to write a book about it first.

If Evernote Essentials is something that seems right for you, you can pick it up here. I’m off to re-factor my tags.

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.