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Getting really close to the “paperless office”

I’ve been on a personal battle against piles of paper, as have most of my clients. Using the Mac to run your business has made that easier, but most people, aren’t aware of the free, already built in tools in Mac OS X that help you do that easily. Also, there are a few great 3rd party hardware and software tools that I use and recommend to help take things further. Here are a few of the things I do and recommend to help keep paper to a minimum…

1) Save As PDF… Whenever I buy something online and am asked to “Print a copy for your records”, or come across a web page that I know I’ll refer to later, but am afraid it will change or disappear from the web, I DO choose “Print”. But at the print dialog, I DON’T press the final “Print” button in the lower right — I go to the PDF menu in the lower left, and choose “Save As PDF…”

This “prints” to a PDF file. I can then use Spotlight to search for any text in the PDF later, so it is easy to find. I just saved a tree!

2) Use Spotlight. Really, that little magnifying glass in the upper right corner of your screen is your quick access to Spotlight’s search engine. Its a powerful tool you should take the time to learn.

(You can also activate it by pressing command-space on your keyboard. This is the same “engine” as command-F for “Find”, but in a more convenient place.) So why use it? Under Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Spotlight was slow and didn’t work very well — it didn’t live up to the hype. Under Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, they fixed it, and it is now speedy and efficient. Spotlight searches _everything_ in your user folder. Not just file names, but the contents of the files. If I just saved a PDF of a web page about an  automatic pet feeder I could use Spotlight to find it by entering automatic cat feed… and before I was done typing, it would show me that PDF as a result. That is a LOT faster than sifting through piles of paper print-outs. Spotlight will find the contents of any file that has text, so PDFs, Word documents, text files, emails (yes, it will find stuff in your email messages), Address Book, etc. That’s strike two against paper!

3) Scan stuff in. Although I produce less paper, I still get it coming to me all the time. My technique to deal with most of it is to scan it in as images/PDFs, and then perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to convert it to searchable text. In the past, doing this with conventional flatbed scanners and graphics-oriented software would be tedious and time consuming. These days, there is a great selection of hardware and software that are focused on doing these things for documents and text. My favorite piece of hardware for this, bar none, is the Fujitsu ScanSanap S510M. For about $450, this this blazes through client checks, stacks of invoices, and business cards, turning them all into PDFs, or sending them wherever you’d like, or to whatever application you designate. You can save presets, so, for example, you want to do low resolution and send it to a folder for purchase orders, but do high resolution and send to ReceiptWallet for receipts.

Oh yeah, ReceiptWallet, for people who want to avoid the “box-o-receipts” at the end of the year, is great software for receiving those PDFs, either “printed” from a web page, or scanned in with your ScanSnap, and storing the image, and allowing you to input the receipt category, type, amount, etc. It will even try to read/OCR your receipt, and fill in the amounts for you. A great product that has made tax time a breeze.

Another product to tame those mountains of business cards, and get them into Daylite or Address Book, is NeatReceipts for Mac. Like ReceiptWallet, it will scan and organize receipts for you, but will also read business cards in, and send them over to Address Book. A huge time saver after a trade show or large meeting, when you haul a stack of cards back with you to the office. NeatReceipts is also bundled with a small, very portable scanner. The scanner isn’t as fast as the ScanSnap, but is tiny, portable, fits in a bag easily, or sits on a desk without hogging too much room. Now you can shred all that stuff and use it for packing material.

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So that’s a quick roundup of my techniques for fighting the war on paper that have been working for me and my clients. These tools are just the beginning, and please feel free to ask me if you’d like to learn more!