There are some products that inspire love and devotion. Users sing their praises whenever they can. One such product is the Fujitsu ScanSnap. Another is Microsoft OneNote. Here’s how to scan to OneNote with the ScanSnap.
Creating A Notebook
OneNote uses the concept of Notebooks to store notes in. When you first install it there is a Personal notebook, but I decided to create a notebook called Documents.
This might not make sense for you- you might want your scanned documents to spread amongst other notebooks, but for simplicity I’ll put them all in one.
Setting Up Sections
Inside each Notebook, you can set up different sections for categorization purposes. In this example, I’m going to set up sections for Home, Tax, Kids, and Office. Set up whatever makes sense to you, of course.
Putting Stuff Into OneNote
When you click on the Insert menu item, you can see that there are a whole bunch of ways to get information into OneNote, whether by attaching files, recording audio or video, using a screen clipper, or by using a File Printout.
You can also drag a file in to the OneNote application itself.
Don’t Hit That Scanner Button
If you are using a ScanSnap, you might be tempted by the siren song of that Scanned Image button.
Since the ScanSnap doesn’t support TWAIN, it’s not going to work in your case. What we need to do is set it up from the ScanSnap Manager side.
Setting Up ScanSnap Manager
When you install OneNote, it creates a special Printer Driver called Send To OneNote 2013 (this will vary based on your version of course). What we are going to do is create a ScanSnap Manager Profile to scan to that Printer.
To set this up:
- Right-click on the ScanSnap icon in your tray and choose Scan Button Settings…
- Click on the Profile box and choose Add Profile. Call it something like Scan To OneNote (Note: You can just use the default Scan To Print Profile too if you want.)
- On the Application tab, choose Scan To Print
- If you don’t want to keep a copy of the PDF in the directory specified on the Save tab, hit the Application Settings button and uncheck the Keep data… checkbox.
- Set the rest of your quality, duplexing, etc. options as desired.
Scan Away
Now when you hit the scan button using your ScanSnap, it will pop up the printer dialog box. Choose your Send To OneNote 2013 printer, and it will scan it right into OneNote.
You can then choose which Notebook and Section you want to save it under, and make that a default if you’d like.
What’s Your Best OneNote Tip?
Do you use OneNote for going paperless? Leave a note in the comment and let us know how you use it.
This post was originally written in July 2010. It was updated in September 2015.
