Paperless Automation Tool For Mac
If you are looking for a quick answer to the question of how to go paperless, here it is.follow these directions in order and enjoy your new freedom from paper:. Buy and read the iBook titled by David Sparks (also available in ). Buy the. As needed apply some of the automation techniques and tools I talk about below Now for all the fun details! Last fall I was part of small team at work that was looking at numerous technologies to enhance our work productivity:. Using iPads to get work done and boost efficiency. Collaborative Working Spaces.
Using Apple TVs and iPads in conference rooms As part of the iPad part of the study we purchased a document scanner as well as an iBook titled by David Sparks and a PDF productivity app called. The purpose of these purchases was to investigate both how difficult it would be to adopt a paperless workflow and what the benefits would be in doing so. Below are the lessons learned from this activity and recommendations for going paperless, specifically for going paperless at home. ScanSnap S1300i We chose this scanner for two main reasons, the highly rated software that comes with the hardware and its ability to work on both a Mac and a PC. For home use the is plenty of scanner for most people.
The main difference between the 1300 and 1100 is that the 1100 can only handle 1 page at time, while the 1300 can handle about 15 pages at once. The ScanSnap is a document scanner (pages are fed through a document feeder.
As opposed to a flatbed scanner that can only do one page at a time). A dedicated document scanner is absolutely required for going paperless because of how fast it is able to scan multiple pages at once (instead of having to open and close the lid of a flatbed scanner for each page). The other key function needed is Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which the ability of the software to look at the scanned “image” from a document and convert that image into text that can be added to the meta data of the scanned electronic file and used later when performing searches for the document.
Without OCR you would only be able to search for the file on your computer based on the title and not the content (words) within the file itself. Why Go Paperless? There are many benefits to shifting to a paperless workflow, storing paper takes up more physical space than digital storage and you can’t easily carry all of your paper documents with you all the time (storage and portability/accessibility). There is also an obvious financial benefit if you can significantly reduce the amount of paper used by saving in printer, paper, copier, and document shredding costs. Electronic data is also a more secure way to store and transmit sensitive data as opposed to keeping paper files under lock and key in a cabinet and having to physically mail or fax them to people. To me the biggest advantage to going paperless is the dramatic increase in data accessibility you get if your paperless workflow is implemented properly. While there is certainly a long-term cost savings to dramatically reducing paper usage, in my experience the culture shock associated with going paperless will almost always overwhelm any incentive to move from a paper workflow to digital.
Automation Tools For Web Applications
However, what I have found with this study is that much of the “culture shock” of going paperless can be alleviated if you follow a sound workflow and adopt a few really powerful tools. Given all of this, the real “carrot at the end of the stick” that will eventually win over the masses to paperless is the ability to always be able to access your data. I’ve found that people don’t completely understand just how valuable this is until you are in a situation where you have the data you need at your fingers and they don’t.then they are immediately sold! Data Accessibility Being able to easily search for and access all of your data anywhere you happened to be when you need that data is the killer feature of paperless workflow.