Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

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.

Using the Kelly Clarkson quote was just way too easy, I know.  This post is not in fact about American Idol winners, but is about Hazel, a Mac-only rules-based file management application.  It does a ton of stuff, but today I am going to talk about how you can use it in a paperless workflow.

To be honest, DocumentSnap readers have been mentioning Hazel to me for quite some time, but for whatever reason I have never gotten around to looking at it until now.  As usual, you guys are way smarter than I am.  Why on earth did I wait?

Basically, you can think of Hazel as something that brings iTunes Smart Playlist-like rules to the files on your Mac.

How can this help in a paperless workflow?  Well, for example, you could have Hazel watch a folder, and then anything that you drop into it could be tagged, Spotlight comments added, OCR’ed, and then sent to a specific folder.

David Sparks from MacSparky has a great runthrough on how he does this.  I definitely recommend checking it out.  He has a bunch of Hazel rules that get triggered when he names a file something, like “gas bill”.  As soon as he names a file “gas bill.pdf”, the Hazel rules kick in and it gets renamed with the appropriate date added, then it gets sent to a nested folder structure based on type and date.  Very cool stuff.

He also describes this workflow in episodes #3 and #25 of the Mac Power Users Podcast.

Hazel And Evernote

As I said, there are a bunch of different ways you can use for Hazel in a paperless workflow.  One that pops to mind is to create a rule that sends something to Evernote.  Lets say we scan or receive PDFs and want to send certain ones to Evernote.

In my example, I’ll create a folder under Documents called “ToEvernote”.

Then I will create a Hazel Rule called “Evernote Import” that watches that folder, and acts on any PDFs that I save there.

First I will create a condition that acts on any files with Extension PDF:

Then I will run an Applescript, so will choose “Run Applescript”.  I will leave as “embedded script” and then hit “Edit Script”

Then I will paste in the following code to that box:

tell application "Evernote"
activate
create note from file theFile
end tell

Then I will hit the Plus sign to add a new action.  Once a file has been added to Evernote, I don’t want to keep it around, so I trash it.  I choose Move File and then select the Trash folder.

Here is what my final rule looks like:

Now, as soon as I drag a PDF into that toEvernote folder, Evernote pops up with the new note and the PDF is trashed. Coolio!

Of course, you can get extremely fancy here, but between this post and David Sparks’, you should be well on your way to paperless fun with Hazel.

I’m rocking the 14 day free trial now, but I think I will be paying the $22 to buy the full version.  Great stuff.

Do you use Hazel? Have any tricks? Leave a note in the comments.

I’ve written quite a bit about the stuff that you can put into Evernote, but what about when you want to take data out?

Any time you are using a “cloud based” service, it’s a legitimate concern: what if the company goes away or if you want to leave the service?  Or what if you just want to have a backup somewhere?

Fortunately Evernote makes this pretty easy to do.   The screenshots for this post are for the Mac version of Evernote, but the Windows concept is the same.

Use The Local Client

You can definitely use Evernote as an exclusively web or mobile based system, but chances are you are using what is called a “local client”.  This means either the Mac or Windows program that runs on your computer.  This is what you’re going to need to use to export your notes.

When you export, you can either export all your notes, a specific notebook, or a specific note.

Exporting All Notes

• In the Notebooks section, right click on All notebooks
• Choose Export Notes…

• When the popup appears, in the Save As field give the export a name.  That will be the name of the folder (if you choose HTML) or the file (if you choose Evernote XML)
• Choose the folder you want to save your export in
• Decide whether you want to export as HTML or Evernote XML (read on to find out which one you want to choose)

Exporting A Specific Notebook

• In the Notebooks section, right click on the notebook you want to export
• Choose Export Notes…
• When the popup appears, in the Save As field give the export a name.  That will be the name of the folder (if you choose HTML) or the file (if you choose Evernote XML)
• Choose the folder you want to save your export in
• Decide whether you want to export as HTML or Evernote XML (read on to find out which one you want to choose)

Exporting A Specific Note

• In the notes section, right click on the note you want to export
• Choose Export Notes…

• When the popup appears, in the Save As field give the export a name.  That will be the name of the folder (if you choose HTML) or the file (if you choose Evernote XML)
• Choose the folder you want to save your export in
• Decide whether you want to export as HTML or Evernote XML (read on to find out which one you want to choose)

When you export, you have two options for exporting:  Export as HTML, or as “Evernote XML” (.enex).  I’ll explain both below, but start with exporting as HTML since that’s what most normal humans will want to do.

Export As HTML

If you choose that option, Evernote will create an HTML file (basically a web page you can view on your computer) for each note.  If your note has images, the HTML file will display them.  If it has other attachments like PDFs or MP3s, it will link to them.  Here is how it works.  In this example I will export a notebook.

1) Export Your Notebook.  Since my wife and I love Portland, I have a notebook with Portland tips.

2) I am going to save it to my Desktop in a folder called Portland Notes as HTML

3) Now when I go to my Desktop, there is a folder called Portland Notes, and inside it is a bunch of .html files, one for each note.  If the note has attachments, there is a “.resources” folder too where the attachments live.

You’ll also notice there is a file called index.html.  Let’s click that, shall we?

4) When we open index.html, it is a handy list of all the notes that we have exported with links to each one.

5) When we open a note that had an image, you can see that the image displays inside the note

6) If we open a note that had a PDF, there is a link to the PDF file that we can then open

Export As Evernote XML

If all you want is a backup, or if you want to move your Evernote data to some other system, it may make more sense to export as an Evernote XML file (.enex).

The concept of exporting it is the same, but if you choose Evernote XML, instead of a bunch of HTML files that get exported, you instead just get one big XML file.  Here’s what it looks like if we export that same Portland notebook.

As you can see, if you don’t speak XML this isn’t going to help you much, but it preserves all your notes, tags, and data for importing into Evernote or another application.

So there you go, there is how you export your information out of Evernote.  Any other ways I didn’t mention?  Has anyone used the .enex files for anything interesting? Leave a note in the comments.

Photo: BinaryApe

Let me start by saying I don’t yet have an iPad (darn that need vs. want distinction). Therefore, this post is not a review of these different iPad apps for PDF viewing and document management, but more of a roundup of apps I have coveted from afar.

With that said, I have used some of them, but on my iPod Touch, not an actual iPad. If you have anything to add about any of these apps, definitely leave a note in the comments.

Ready? Lets go.

To start with, what some people don’t realize is that you don’t need to find a “PDF reader app” to have a good document experience on the iPad:

Dropbox (Service free up to 2GB, App is free): I am sure you are saying “what the, isn’t Dropbox a file syncing app?’). Yes, yes it is. However, it is also my favorite PDF viewer on the iPhone. If there are any PDFs or other documents I want to be able to access on the go, I throw them into my Dropbox folder and it syncs it up with the app. It’s really great.

Evernote (Service free to store PDFs and images and transfer 40MB/month, App is free): Any regular readers know that I am a fan of Evernote, and they recently released an iPad version of their great app. Free users can sync individual notes/documents for offline viewing, and Premium users can sync entire notebooks and store any type of document.

Box.net (Service free up to 1GB, App is free): Similar to Dropbox, it is a cloud-based service that stores all your files and then you can view them on the app. Box.net also lets you share files with other users. One thing it doesn’t have is local storage which Dropbox and Evernote do have.

Of course, if you just want an actual PDF reading, “there’s an app for that”:

PDF Reader Pro (.99 on iTunes): Allows you to view a bunch of document formats and syncs via Wi-Fi or USB.

GoodReader (.99 on iTunes): Syncs via wifi or USB and has “automatic reflow” to automatically wrap words. It integrates with Box.net, Dropbox, and Google Docs which is pretty cool. GoodReader also views Office, iWork, images, audio, and video.

ReaddleDocs for iPad (4.99 on iTunes): Pretty similar to GoodReader from what I can tell.

iAnnotate PDF (9.99 on iTunes): It’s not just a PDF reader, but it also will let you actually mark up/annotate/highlight the documents. It integrates the PDF annotations right into the file so they carry over to Acrobat or Preview if you send the document to someone. One thing it lacks is integration with Dropbox/Google Docs etc. You have to transfer the files by USB, iTunes sync, or a desktop transfer software.

So there you go, a list to get you started. Any killer apps that I missed? Any good/bad/otherwise experience with any of these? Leave a note in the comments.

Update: I am adding Fast PDF as a write-in vote from people in the comments.

For whatever reason, I don’t tend to write as much about all-in-one or multifunction devices. You know, the ones that print, scan, fax, make waffles, etc.

Maybe it is because the frustration with the one that I have is what lead me to getting into this whole DocumentSnap thing in the first place.

Anyways, it’s time that I rectified this, so I am going to do it right now by pointing you to the Lexmark SmartSolution line of devices.

Why these particular multifunctions? They have some pretty interesting features. I’m not really going to get into the printing part because, you know, that kind of goes against what this whole site is about. I’m going to talk about the connectivity and scanning parts.

• Wireless – All the devices come with Wireless-N so that you can print, scan, etc. without needing to be plugged in.
• Big Touch Screen – All the functionality is performed by a large colour touch screen
• Apps! – I am all about the apps, and Lexmark has little applications that they call (drum roll) SmartSolutions that you can download to your device. You can find more info on what is available here.
• ADF Scanning – The Prestige Pro805, Pinnacle Pro901, and Platinum Pro905 all come with an automatic document feeder, so you can put in a stack of documents and it will suck them in.
• Evernote Integration – Yep, you heard me right. There is a “Scan To Evernote” SmartSolution that will let you scan a document or photo right into your Evernote account.
• Duplex Printing – It will print on both sides. Handy for saving paper when you do have to print something.

So, all in all, not too shabby.

There are four flavors of SmartSolution devices, so I’ll give you a quick runthrough.

Lexmark Interact S605 – The most basic model. It has all the features above except for the document feeder for scanning. You need to put one sheet at a time on the flatbed. If you are going to do any volume of scanning at all (which you probably will be if you are reading this site), I’d probably not choose this one.

Lexmark Prestige Pro805 – Has the features above, including the document feeder for scanning. It comes with a network port for plugging into the network if you don’t want to use Wi-Fi.

Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901 – Has the features above, plus can also fax.

Lexmark Platinum Pro905 – The big daddy. Has all the features of the Pro901 but has an extra tray for more printing capacity.

So there you go. As far as all-in-ones go, the Lexmark SmartSolution line looks pretty decent. Do you have another multifunction device that you love? Let us know about it in the comments.

So I know that I posted about Evernote just a few days ago, but I couldn’t possibly let this go by without letting you guys know about it.

Evernote and Fujitsu cut a deal where if you buy a ScanSnap S1500 (for Windows) or S1500M (for Mac) and then sign up for an Evernote Premium account, Fujitsu will rebate you $50. Not bad!

Unfortunately, this deal is only for US residents (first Hulu and now this?!), but for the Americans in the house it’s a pretty sweet deal.

Here are the details from their blog post:

• Your ScanSnap must be purchased between May 1st, 2010 and July 31st, 2010
• You must have an annual Evernote Premium account, if you’re month-to-month consider switching to the annual version
• Complete this rebate form, making sure to include your Evernote information
• Mail the completed form along with the original UPC to the specified address
• This is open to US residents only. Please review the Terms and Conditions on the rebate form for additional rules

Check their post for more information. Hope this helps!