Ask The Readers: Best Windows Document Software?
April 14, 2009
Photo by iwantanimac
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I am generally a Mac user. I do have access to borrow a Windows ScanSnap, but my personal ScanSnap is a S300M.
One thing I get asked quite a bit is which software should someone use to manage their PDFs? The ScanSnap comes with ScanSnap Organizer and a trial of Rack2-Filer, but what is the best?
The Mac of course has Devonthink, Yep, and others, but what abut Windows?
Since I don’t personally use Windows for my PDF management, I thought I’d open it up to you. What do you use to manage your documents? Do you use OneNote? Evernote? Your own personal folder structure?
Weigh in and leave a comment and let us all know what you use and why.
Fujitsu ScanSnap and Microsoft OneNote – Happy Together
September 12, 2008
A reader (hi Matt!) wrote in because he was having trouble getting his ScanSnap S500 to work seamlessly with Microsoft OneNote 2007.
Previously what he had to do was scan to a folder, then go into OneNote and manually import the file in. Needless to say if you do this a lot, it gets to be a pain.
We eventually figured it out so I thought I would share it with you here. Here is the workflow:
- OneNote 2007 (not sure about earlier versions) installs a printer driver called “Send to OneNote 2007″ (as referenced here).
- Go into ScanSnap Manager and create a profile with your desired settings, and for Application choose Scan To Print. Choose the Send To OneNote 2007 printer as your printer
- Scan a page and ScanSnap Manager should send it straight into OneNote 2007
I Don’t Have Scan To Print!
There was one small snag with the plan that we came up with. Matt did not have the “Scan To Print” option in ScanSnap Manager.
His model of ScanSnap, the S500, is an older model and the version of ScanSnap Manager that shipped with it did not have the Scan To Print option.
We thought we were toast until we found that Fujitsu has released updated versions of ScanSnap Manager. The list of them for the different models is here: http://www.fujitsu.com/global/support/computing/peripheral/scanners/drivers/scansnap.html
The link for the S500 specifically is here: http://www.fujitsu.com/global/support/computing/peripheral/scanners/drivers/s500.html
After installing the new software, he was able to Scan to Print straight into OneNote.
Any Better Ideas?
This is the solution that we came up with. Do you have any other ways of using the ScanSnap to automatically scan into Microsoft OneNote? Let us know in the comments.
Document Storage: The Yahoo or Google Philosophy?
July 31, 2008
Once you have your documents scanned you then of course need to put the PDFs somewhere.
There are basically two schools of thought for document storage: storing in a folder structure (the Old Yahoo model), or dumping it all in one place and letting search take over (the Google model).
Old Yahoo Model – Folders
If you have been around the Internet for a long time, you will remember that Yahoo started out as strictly a directory, where websites would get placed in a hierarchical category structure.
The folder model of document structure is sort of like that. Set up an elaborate folder structure, and when it is time to file away a document, you figure out which folder it should go in.
The advantages of this are that you don’t need any third party application, and the folder concept is something that we have used for years and everyone understands.
The downside is that you then have to figure out which folder the file goes into, and when you are looking for a document, you have to go through and figure out where you saved it.
It also takes regular processing to go through and move the files to the right place in your structure.
The Google Model – Search
Google’s advantage (among many) is that it didn’t have to rely on people putting websites in certain categories, and it didn’t rely on searchers knowing which category to find the site. Users could just type in a keyword and as long as Google indexed the site, it would show the result.
With the search model of document storage, PDFs are dumped in one or just a few folders, and then when you want to find something, you just do a keyword search to bring back documents containing that keyword.
This can be a very effective model as long as PDFs are consistently OCR’ed so that they are searchable, and you know what you are looking for.
Once you have a collection of searchable PDF files, you can use Windows Desktop Search, Google Desktop, or Spotlight on the Mac to search through the documents and find the right one.
You can also take it to the next level and use a software like Yep, Evernote, Devonthink , or OneNote to collect and store your documents and do the searching inside it.
The downside of using the search model is, as I said, you have to know what you are searching for before you search. It may be hard to remember certain keywords from the document.
Also, if you are searching for fairly generic keywords, your search may bring back a ton of results, making it a pain to wade through them.
Which Model Do You Use?
Personally, I use a hybrid.
I do have a folder structure but I try to keep things high level without too many subfolders. I then make sure that documents are searchable by OCRing them once my Fujitsu ScanSnap has done it’s job.
When I am looking for a document, I generally use the search method because that is how I am used to finding information. It’s just nice to know that the folder structure is there as a backup.
What setup do you have for saving/finding your scanned PDFs?
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