Last year, our office bought a document scanner. Unlike every other scanner I had purchased or used, this thing was tiny. Its footprint on a desk is smaller than a piece of paper. It is designed specifically for turning pieces of paper into PDF documents. I had to try it. It scanned both sides of my paper in 3 seconds. One pass, both sides!
Such a gadget is very exciting because I have a lot of paper. I’m not a compulsive hoarder, but I do keep financial records longer than the minimum 7 years. Combine that with the documents retention required for our business and before long we had two 4-drawer file cabinets of documents. And a couple desk drawers. And the pile on Jen’s desk. And the pile in my hutch.
The prospect of making all that paper disappear helped me get over the resistance I had to parting with $400. So I purchased the SnapScan S510M (since replaced by the S1500M). While waiting for it to arrive, I started thinking about how I was going to organize the thousands of PDF files that would soon be residing on my hard drive.
I had nightmares of the days before iTunes when I had to painstakingly tag all my music by hand, and then organize the music files into directories so I had a slight chance of finding what I was looking for. I needed an iTunes equivalent for PDF documents. Google led me to ReceiptWallet, which has since become Mariner Paperless. It promised to be iTunes for documents, so I bought it. Instantly.
The SnapScan comes with several software packages: Adobe Acrobat Pro 8, CardIris, Abbyy FineReader OCR, and the SnapScan drivers. With a large bucket of tools in place, it was time to do some planning.
To be continued…
I want an update!!! I was thinking about getting one of these and am interested in your experience… let me know how the OCR works if you try it too.