Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

Windows Search in newer versions of Microsoft Windows works pretty well, but sometimes it is may not be picking up files that you think it should, or perhaps you want to tell it not to search for some files or types of files.

This video shows you how to control the Indexing Options for Windows Search in Windows 7.

By the way, if you are finding that searching for the contents of PDFs is not working, you may have the dreaded 64-bit Windows 7 PDF Search problem.

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 ecstaticist)

This video on controlling Windows Search’s Indexing Options is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

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)

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

Sometimes if you are looking for a document, as a last resort it can be helpful to just get a big list of all the documents on your computer.

This video takes you through using Windows Search to find all the PDFs on your Windows 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.

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

Finally, my new MacBook Air is here and I am back up and running with making videos.

Today’s is a quick tip on how you can easily compare and move around windows using Windows 7′s Snap functionality. As a bonus, I threw in Peek and Shake as well.

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.

As I have mentioned earlier, the question of “what do I do with my files once I have scanned them?” comes up quite a bit. If you use Windows, it can be hard to decide which paperless office software package to use (or if you even need one).

In a strange role reversal, a client of mine came across and recommended FileCenter by Lucion to me. Since playing around with it, I have passed on that recommendation to a number of Windows users that have written me (and they all love it), but somehow I have never actually written about FileCenter on the blog. So, here we go.

FileCenter is a software package that sits firmly in the middle of the options out there. It is easy enough to use for home use, but it has enough power to be used by businesses. It is not a heavy-duty enterprise Document Management System, but it doesn’t cost thousands of dollars either.

How Are Files Represented?

When you use FileCenter, you have a choice between showing your files as a normal Windows-like folder structure, or having them represented as “Cabinets”, “Drawers”, and “Folders”.

Personally I recommend going with the cabinets view but do whatever works for you.

File Storage

One of the best features of FileCenter, in my opinion, is that it uses the normal Windows file structure to store its documents. It does not move them into some proprietary database.

For example, here is a screenshot from FileCenter showing a cabinet, drawer, and some files:

Now here is the screenshot from Windows:

Cabinets, drawers, and folders are just represented as normal Windows folders, so it is very easy to get at your documents if you ever need to.

(By the way, they don’t all have to be in the same folder. A cabinet can be on a network drive or some other location).

File Naming Rules

If you have a bunch of regularly recurring documents that have a standard name (for example, bills), you can create file naming rules that will automatically name the document when you file it.

As an example, I have a drawer called “Terasen Gas” to represent a gas bill. I set up a naming rule so that when I file something in that folder, it automatically names it to today’s date with the name of the drawer.

Here is the rule:

Now when I want to drag a file from my Inbox to a folder, I choose my rule as the “drop name” and then drag it

Now you can see the file is automatically renamed.

Folder Templates

If you work with clients, projects, or have some situation where you often have a folder structure with a set of subfolders, you can set up folder templates to automatically create these for you.

For example, on this client folder, I will choose Apply Folder Templates and choose one I set up called Client.

Now it has automatically created the client folder structure under ABC Corp:

You can probably see how useful this could be when you have a bunch of date-based folders.

“But Wait, There’s More!”

These are only a few of the features that FileCenter has, but I think you get the idea. It does OCR, lets you split and edit documents, converts PDFs, encrypts and securely deletes documents, and a bunch of other stuff.

I recommend checking out the features page for a list of all of them. They have little videos for each feature.

Versions

FileCenter comes in three versions: Standard, Pro, and Pro PLUS. You can compare the versions here.

It is not the cheapest software out there, but it is not the most expensive either. If it were me, I would probably go for the Pro version as it has the drop renaming and other features that Standard doesn’t have.

If you have a ScanSnap, you can probably get away without Pro PLUS as the scanner’s software can take care of most of the extra features (page rotation, advanced OCR).

Any FileCenter users out there? Leave a comment and let us know what you like and don’t like about it.

The ScanSnap Organizer program that comes with WIndows versions of the Fujitsu ScanSnap is pretty good, but it does have one big limitation that DocumentSnap reader Katherine from Austin Texas ran into: you can’t OCR or set keywords to PDF files that were not created by the ScanSnap scanner.

I couldn’t find a built-in way to set PDF keywords in Windows 7 like there is on the Mac (if anyone knows one, please leave it in the comments), but here are a few options for doing it.

A-PDF Info Changer

A-PDF Info Changer is a handy Windows utility that lets you open up a PDF and set all the associated metadata such as Author, Title, Subject and Keywords.

It is freeware, but they do request a donation so if you find it useful kick them a few bucks. It has a command-line version for $35 that lets you manipulate a bunch of PDFs all at once.

For the free version, just fire it up and set your keywords separated by commas. Then hit Save File and you are done.

By the way, A-PDF has a huge number of little PDF utilities, many with freeware versions, that are worth checking out. If you need to do something with Windows, chances are they have a utility to do it.

Adobe Acrobat

It would be overkill to buy Acrobat just for this purpose, but if you have a ScanSnap S1500 or ScanSnap S1500M you already own it.

Open up the PDF in Acrobat and go to File > Properties and you can enter the keywords in the Keywords box.

Any other tricks to set keywords and PDF metadata on Windows? Leave a comment and let us know.

If you are a Mac OS X user, you will be familiar with Time Machine. If you are reading this site I would hope you are, as it is the super-easy backup solution that is built into the OS.

The premise of Time Machine is you plug in an external hard drive, your Mac detects it, and off you go backing up without having to do much of anything.

However, what happens if you don’t have an external hard drive, but you have another computer, particularly a Windows or Linux machine, on your network that you want to use for your backups?

Lifehacker has posted a guide (two actually) on how to accomplish this.

It is not for the faint of heart or people who don’t like messing around in the Terminal, but long story short you:

1. Create a shared folder on the Windows machine
2. Change a setting in the Mac to open a hidden Time Machine option
3. Do some Terminal trickery to get Time Machine to start doing the backup to the Windows machine

I recommend you read this Lifehacker post first so that you know what is going on, and in particular read the comments which provide some additional input.

Then, if you want to go for it, read this Lifehacker post which has a shell script that does a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

Remember, this all adds a layer of complexity over and above simply plugging a drive in, so I would recommend being careful and test your backups regularly.

Do you have any other Time Machine hacks? Let’s hear them in the comments.

(Photo by AdamL212)

A very common request that I get here at DocumentSnap is to compare the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities of ABBYY FineReader with Adobe Acrobat. Why? Well, for starters, both of them come included with models the Fujitsu ScanSnap as well as other scanners.

I decided to do a quick test comparing the OCR of the two packages using the following criteria:

• OCR Speed
• Resulting File Size
• Accuracy

The Hardware

For a scanner I used my ScanSnap S1300.

I used two computers for the test:

• Windows: A new cheap Acer laptop with a Core i3 2.40 GHz processor and 4 GB RAM running Windows 7
• Mac: An old 2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 4 GB RAM running Mac OS X Snow Leopard

The Software

Here are the packages I used:

• Windows: ABBYY FineReader For ScanSnap 4.1 (called from ScanSnap Manager) vs. Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro
• Mac: ABBYY FineReader For ScanSnap 4.1 (run standalone) vs. Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro

Yes, I realize that Adobe Acrobat X is out, but since I am not aware of any scanners that come bundled with it yet, I decided to stick with the versions that ship with the ScanSnap. I’ll update Acrobat X in a later post.

The Document

I scanned a magazine article for this test. It probably would have been better to do this with a bunch of different documents to compare, but hey.

In all cases except one, I scanned without OCR so that I could run it standalone later. Here’s some info on the document that I used:

• Pages: 2
• Scan Quality: 300dpi, Color
• Resulting File Size: 1.5 MB
• Columns: 2, with some images

Maybe I am blind, but I couldn’t figure out a way to run ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap on Windows standalone. If you know how, please leave a message in the comments. In that test, I re-scanned with “Create Searchable PDF” checked in the ScanSnap Manager settings.

The Settings

I tried not to do too many fancy settings to keep things as “real-life” as possible. There were essentially three configurations:

ABBYY FineReader

I set Save Mode to “Text under page image” and Quality to High. These were the settings for the Mac ABBYY, and I believe it is what ScanSnap Manager on Windows uses as well.

Adobe Acrobat (Normal)

I set the output style to “Searchable Image (Exact)” because leaving it just as Searchable Image in my experience has caused some weird things to happen with the resulting PDF. I used these settings on both Windows and Mac.

Adobe Acrobat (With ClearScan)

In Acrobat 9 there is a setting called ClearScan. I used that as an additional test to see what the difference is.

Speed

Windows

• ABBYY Windows: 20.5 seconds
• Acrobat 9: 13.9 seconds
• Acrobat 9 With Clearscan: 17.6 seconds

Mac

• ABBYY Mac: 44.7 seconds
• Acrobat 8: 20.2 seconds

Winner: Acrobat!

Since they are different machines, you can’t directly compare the Windows and Mac times, but clearly in both cases Acrobat is faster.

File Size

The non-OCR’ed PDF was 1.5 MB.

Windows

• ABBYY Windows: 1.7 MB (+.2 MB)
• Acrobat 9: 1.5 MB (same)
• Acrobat 9 With ClearScan: 315 KB (-1.16 MB)

Mac

• ABBYY Mac: 1.4 MB (-.1 MB)
• Acrobat 8: 1.5 MB (same)

Winner: Acrobat 9 with ClearScan!

With an astonishing 1.16 MB reduction in file size after OCR, Acrobat 9 with ClearScan is the winner. Wow.

Accuracy

Here is a passage from the article:

Let’s see how each of the packages did:

ABBYY Windows

The spreadsheet has become the virtual “slide rule” for CMAs. It’s used for everything from preliminary strategic plans to financial statements. As with any familiar method, it finds its way into numerous situations where better alternatives are available, mostsignificantly in itswidespread use as a de facto reporting tool.
The appeal of the spreadsheet as the quickest way to get a report out is not hard to appreciate. “Excel is probably the most comfortable environment for a lot of financial professionals,” Alok Ajmera, vice-president, professional services withMississauga, Ont.-basedProphixSoftware, says. “There’s a very little learning curve, you can effectively do whatever you want with the data, and it works fairly well in smaller organizations.”
Periodic and complex reporting in processes like revenue management or cost management, however, is where the spreadsheet model really starts to break down.

Acrobat 9 Windows

T he spreadsheet has become the virtual “slide rule” for CMAs. It’s used for everything from preliminary su·ategic plans to financial statements. As with any farniliar method, it finds its way into numerous situations where better alternatives are available, most significantly in its widespread use as a de facto reporting tool.
The appeal of tlle spreadsheet as the quickest way to get a report out is not hard to appreciate. “Excel is probably tlle most comfortable environment for a lot of financial professionals,” AJok Ajmera, vice-president, professional services with Mississauga, Ont.-based Prophix Software, says. “There’s a very little learning curve, you can effectively do whatever you want witll tlle data, and it works fairly well in smaller organizations.”
Periodic and complex reporting in processes like revenue management or cost management, however, is where the spreadsheet model really starts to break down.

Acrobat 9 With ClearScan

The spreadsheet has become the virtual “slide rule” for CMAs. It’s used for everything from preliminary su·ategic plans to financial statements. As with any farniliar method, it finds its way into numerous situations where better alternatives are available, most significantly in its widespread use as a de facto reporting tool.
The appeal of tlle spreadsheet as the quickest way to get a report out is not hard to appreciate. “Excel is probably tlle most comfortable environment for a lot of financial professionals,” AJok Ajmera, vice-president, professional services with Mississauga, Ont.-based Prophix Software, says. “There’s a very little learning curve, you can effectively do whatever you want witll tlle data, and it works fairly well in smaller organizations.”
Periodic and complex reporting in processes like revenue management or cost management, however, is where the spreadsheet model really starts to break down.

ABBYY Mac

The spreadsheet has become the virtual “slide rule” for CiMAs. It’s used for everything from preliminary strategic plans to financial statements. As with any familiar method, it finds its way into numerous situations where better alternatives are available, most significantly in its widespread use as a de facto reporting tool.
The appeal of die spreadsheet as the quickest way to get a report out is not hard to appreciate. “Excel is probably the most comfortable environment for a lot of financial professionals,” Alok Ajmera, vice-president, professional sendees with Mississauga, Ont.-based Prophix Software, says. “There’s a very little learning curve, you can effectively do whatever you want with the data, and it works fairly well in smaller organizations.”
Periodic and complex reporting in processes like revenue management or cost management, however, is where the spreadsheet model really starts to break down.

Acrobat 8 Mac

T he spreadsheet has become the virtual “slide rule” for CMAs. It’s used for everything frorn preliminary strategic plans to financial statements. Aswith any familiar method, it finds its way into numerous situations where better alterna tives are available, most significantly in its widespread use as a de facto reporting tool.
T he appeal of the spreadsheet as the quickest
way to get a report out is not hard to appreciate.
“Excel is probably the most comfortable
environment for a lot of financial professionals,” avaJlaun:.:,JIIU:::’l;)It;IIIULauuy1111l::>WIUC::>PU:C1U uocd::>
a de facto reporting tool. T he appeal of the spreadsheet as the quickest
way to get a report out is not hard to appreciate. “Excel is probably me most comfortable environment for a lot of financial professionals,” AJok Ajmera, vice-president, professional services with Mississauga, Ont.-based Prophix Software, says. “T here’s a very little learning curve, you can effectively do whatever you want with the data, and it works fairly well in smaller organiza tions.”
Periodic and complex reporting in processes like revenue management or cost management, however, is where the spreadsheet model really starts to break down.

Winner: ABBYY FineReader for Mac looks the best to me. Acrobat 8 on the Mac is pretty terrible (in this example anyways).

Conclusion

Is there a “best” choice? It seems that in this example anyways, Adobe Acrobat 9 with ClearScan turned on gives fast results with good OCR while dramatically reducing the file size.

If you don’t really care about speed so much, FineReader produces good OCR results and for ScanSnap users, has the additional benefit of being integrated with ScanSnap Manager.

As with most things, the best software is the one that works the best for you. Have you found similar results? Any other tests of your own to share? Leave a note in the comments.

(Photo by Polina Sergeeva)

One of the best things about modern operating systems like Mac OSX and Windows 7 is that search is built right in, specifically PDF search. You don’t need to have a third party tool to search the contents of a searchable PDF, the OS will do it for you.

That is, unless you are running the 64-bit version of Windows 7.

It is fairly common for DocumentSnap readers to write in with questions/problems, but it is pretty handy when a reader writes in with both the problem and the solution, which is exactly what superstar DocumentSnap reader Matt did recently.

Matt had a problem: He was scanning all these OCR’ed PDFs, but Windows Search was not finding them when he typed a keyword in the document. It would only find it if he typed in the name of a file, which pretty much defeats the purpose of Optical Character Recognition. Not having a Windows machine at the time I was flying blind, but we went back and forth and eventually he figured out what the issue was: an iFilter (but I am getting ahead of myself here).

What Is 64 Bit Windows And Do I Have It?

There are basically two types of Windows: 32-bit and 64-bit. I’ll let Microsoft describe the difference:

The terms 32-bit and 64-bit refer to the way a computer’s processor (also called a CPU), handles information. The 64-bit version of Windows handles large amounts of random access memory (RAM) more effectively than a 32-bit system.

It used to be that only high-end computers were 64-bit, but that has changed in the last year or two. This cheap Acer laptop I am writing this on is 64-bit, for example. How can you tell which kind of Windows you have?

• Click the Start button
• Right-click on Computer, choose Propterties
• You will see an entry for System Type which will give you the information that you need.

If you are having problems with PDF search and your System type says 32-bit, you can probably stop reading. This post likely won’t help you.

What Is The Problem?

Windows 7′s search capabilities are pretty good, but for some reason the 64-bit has a problem indexing PDF files. Windows Search uses something called an iFilter to help it index files, and the PDF iFilter for 64-bit Windows is missing. (This probably applies to 64-bit Vista and 64-bit XP too).

Here is how to tell if you have the problem:

• Click on the Start Menu and choose Control Panel
• Change View By to Small Icons and click on Indexing Options
• Click on the Advanced button
• Click on the File Types tab
• Scroll way down to pdf and you will probably see Registered IFilter Is Not Found

If you see that message, you have the iFilter problem.

As an additional test, download or scan a searchable PDF. You can see here that I am searching for the word “Westminster” in Acrobat Reader and it is finding it. When I search using the search box under the Start menu, it doesn’t find it.

Replace The Missing IFilter

To fix the problem, you need to download the missing iFilter.

Download Adobe PDF iFilter 9 for 64-bit platforms here

Note: You may notice that it does not list Windows 7 in the list of supported Operating Systems. While it worked fine for Matt and I, you need to make your own decision if you want to risk installing it.

Once you download it, unzip it and run the installer.

When the installer completes, go back and look at the file types list from above. It should now say “PDF Filter” instead of the “Registered IFilter Is Not Found” message. Yeah!

Test The New iFilter

Download or scan a new searchable PDF and find a word that is in the text and search on it in Acrobat Reader. For example, here I searched for the word “idyll”.

Now I will search for it in Windows Search, and it looks like it found it. Double Yeah!

Now lets search for Westminster again:

Looks like it still didn’t find it. No!

It turns out that fixing the iFilter will only fix new documents, not the one that Windows Search has already indexed.

Do A Re-Index

In order to fix this problem, we’ll need to tell Windows 7 to do a re-index. If you have a large hard drive, this could take a long time, so do it before you are going to bed or something.

• Click on the Start Menu and choose Control Panel
• Change View By to Small Icons and click on Indexing Options
• Click the Advanced button
• On the Indexing Settings tab, hit Rebuild

Once this is done, let’s try searching for Westminster again. Hopefully third time’s the charm?

It’s there!

Thanks again to Matt for doing the detective work on this one. Hopefully it will help one of you if you find that your 64-bit Windows isn’t finding your documents.

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?