The idea of a paperless office may sound enticing, or even inspiring. It may also sound intimidating. If you make the transition to a paperless lifestyle, what steps will you have to take—and what will you get in return? In this chapter I look at the advantages of a paperless office (ranging from obvious to novel), and then describe some of its crucial components. I also help you imagine what your paperless office will ultimately look like.
If you’re reading this ebook, chances are you already have a paper-related problem you’re trying to solve. You know the ways in which paper is causing you pain, so it’s apparent how a paperless office would be soothing. But, in fact, a paperless office can solve many problems simultaneously—including some you didn’t even realize you had! Let’s look what you can accomplish by moving from paper to digital:
Although a paperless office has many aspects, one central assumption is that many documents that are currently on paper will end up on your computer—in a single special format. That format is officially called “PDF Searchable Image,” but most people refer to it using the less-cumbersome term “searchable PDF.” Because this one unique format is the magical key that makes the whole system work, I want to give you a quick overview of the most common PDF (portable document format) varieties so you can see where searchable PDFs fit.
The PDF files most of us encounter daily were created in a program like Microsoft Word or Adobe Illustrator—nearly any app that can produce printed output. Except instead of printing, the document is saved in PDF format, which is relatively compact and looks almost exactly the same on any platform. When an application “prints to PDF,” the new PDF automatically contains searchable text. (There are occasional exceptions for text treated as objects, such as Word’s Word Art and Excel tables embedded in a Word document.) That means, among other things, that you can select and copy text in these PDFs, and that search engines such as Mac OS X’s Spotlight index their contents. This sort of run-of-the-mill PDF is officially called “PDF Normal.”
Normal PDFs can include graphics—either vector artwork or bitmaps that originally came from a scanner or a digital camera. But the PDF format can also be used as a simple wrapper around plain bitmapped images (for example TIFFs and JPEGs) without any other content. This second sort of PDF is officially called “PDF Image Only.”
When you scan documents, your scanning software will probably save PDF Image Only files initially. But then a second process occurs: optical character recognition (OCR), which identifies letters and words in the image. Years ago, OCR produced a plain text file as output or, if you were lucky, an ugly Word file. But today the most popular way to handle the recognized text is to add it as an invisible layer above the bitmapped graphic, with the position of the live text corresponding to the position of the characters in the graphic. So, underneath you may have a graphic with dots that look like the word “sandwich,” and on top of that image is the text of the same word, which you can select, copy, or search just like the text in any normal PDF. This is the PDF Searchable Image, or searchable PDF format.
The enormous advantage of searchable PDF over plain-text OCR output is that you can still see exactly what the original document looked like. And, if you were to print it again, it would look almost identical to the source document. Because no OCR tool is perfect, this also lets you verify what the document actually says, even if the recognized text has some errors.
Meanwhile, the advantage over plain bitmapped images is that you can index, search, and use the text as text. So, if you’ve just scanned a stack of receipts, your scanning software may have given them all unintelligible names like 2014_04_26_11_27_00.pdf, which would never help you find anything—at best you’d have to name them all manually, and at worst you’d have to look at each one to find a certain transaction. But with searchable PDFs you can type a restaurant name into your search field and instantly see the receipt that mentions it.
Searchable PDFs are a wonderful thing, and because they’re the only way I know of to get this dual-layer effect automatically from an OCR app, every document you create as a result of using the instructions in this ebook will be in that format.
If your paper files are in a filing cabinet, then whatever disadvantages paper may have, you can at least be certain that none of the files will spontaneously evaporate, or lose part of their contents, due to a filing cabinet malfunction. Unfortunately, the same is not true of digital data. Digital files typically live on a hard disk or SSD (solid-state drive) somewhere. And digital storage, by its very nature, is subject to all sorts of problems ranging from random directory corruption to user error to theft, not to mention just plain wearing out over time (a bigger problem with mechanical hard drives than with SSDs). So before you begin committing your files to disk—and especially before you get rid of the originals—think about where and how you’ll store the digital files themselves and the physical media they rely on.
I recommend, in particular, taking a moment at the outset to think about three main factors: disk capacity, local versus cloud storage, and media longevity. (Later in the ebook, I talk in more detail about another essential consideration: backups. See Back Up Scanned Data.)
If you follow the instructions in Configure Your Software, you’ll end up with nicely compact PDF files, and you may be able to fit hundreds or even thousands of pages worth of scanned data in just a few gigabytes of disk space. However, keep in mind that your data storage needs will inevitably grow over time. And, if you have tens of thousands of sheets to scan—especially if many of them are in color—you’ll need plenty of room for your data to expand.
In these days when bare 3 TB drives can be found for under $100, it doesn’t make sense to skimp on capacity. If your Mac’s internal disk still has loads of free space, then you may be all set, but if in doubt, you might want to consider upgrading it to a more capacious model, or supplementing it with an external drive.
Because there are so many hard drives and SSDs to choose from, I can’t begin to give recommendations for brands or models. But I can say that for storing your digital archives, it’s worth paying a bit extra for a longer warranty—5 years is the longest I’ve seen. And, all things being equal, if you purchase an external drive, buy one with the fastest interface your Mac supports. For example, Thunderbolt 2 is faster than Thunderbolt, which is faster than USB 3.0, which is faster than FireWire 800, which is faster than FireWire 400, which is faster—in practice if not on paper—than USB 2.0. Although SSDs are far faster and more reliable than mechanical hard drives, they also come at a somewhat higher cost, so you’ll have to factor that into your decision.
In any case, check to see which ports your Mac has, or which you can add by way of an adapter.
Although hard disks are still, in 2014, the main medium used for storing digital data, those disks need not sit in your office. They might just as easily be attached to a server somewhere in the bowels of an anonymous data center halfway around the world. Companies that traffic in data storage and transfer (including Amazon.com, Google, and countless thousands of others) offer data storage in the cloud at reasonable rates—perhaps less per year than what it would cost you to buy a new hard drive.
The advantages of cloud storage for your formerly paper documents are many—for example:
The biggest downside to cloud storage is that it’s much slower to copy data to or from the cloud than to store it locally. Unless you work for a large company with an Internet connection that costs more than the CEO’s annual salary, you’ll get dramatically better speeds with local hard drives. If the amount of data you want to store in the cloud reaches the tens of gigabytes or more, expect it to take weeks to upload over a moderately fast broadband connection.
There are ways around this—for example, some online storage services let you fill a hard drive and send it to them via courier in order to seed your online space; then, you add files to your online space as you go, which is far quicker. Even so, other potential problems remain. What if your Internet connection goes down and you can’t get at your files? What if the storage provider goes out of business? The potential perils of cloud-based storage are such that I wouldn’t recommend it as the sole place to keep your valuable scanned documents. However, I think the cloud makes an excellent secondary location for such files (just as it does for backups).
Cloud storage providers are multiplying quickly, and I wouldn’t even attempt to catalog all the options. However, I can call your attention to a few services that let you store a significant volume of files online at a reasonable cost, and sync them with your Mac and other devices so that you can simply save files in one location and have them automagically transported to the other as well. Some examples:
As I mentioned earlier, hard drives, like all mechanical devices, eventually wear out, so if you’re using them to store documents that you need to keep indefinitely, you should make accommodations for the drives’ likely life spans. (The same, of course, is true of any media—CDs, DVDs, and even solid-state storage degrade over time, although at least in those cases you need not worry about mechanical wear.)
Specifically, I suggest incorporating the following into your paperless office plan:
All right, you’ve seen the benefits of a paperless office and you know some of the details about where you’re headed—document formats and storage media and so forth—but what does your future day-to-day work look like without all the paper? If you can picture it, you’re more likely to make it happen.
When you get to the chapter Create a Workflow for Incoming Paper you can read all the details, but in the meantime, here’s the overall vision I’d like you to aim for: