To the people who know me pretty well, this will come as no shock, to those of you who don’t, I hate paper. Now I have to qualify that. There is some paper that is wonderful. Books for example are a great use of paper. (And no, that Kindle thing from Amazon isn’t going to cut it so don’t ask) I like paper for taking notes about things as well. I have used a Palm for many years and it’s jut not up to handling the input speed of writing on a piece of paper. So paper has it’s uses, please don’t misunderstand.

What I don’t like about paper is that it’s bulky, heavy in large quantities (I’ll spare you my joke about it being made of wood), and it is impossible to search in any meaningful way. It’s also very limited in range. You can’t possibly carry with you every piece of paper that has importance to you if there were a natural disaster. But I have a solution to my paper conundrum. I have a simple name for my process, Scan it and Shred it.

I think Adobe Acrobat Pro is an amazing piece of software. But one of the features that I have discovered is that it’s an EXCELLENT tool for helping you release yourself from the ball and chain that is the paper document. With Acrobat Pro you can scan documents directly in to PDFs. No big deal right? Or so you may think. Here’s where things get interesting. Most scanners come with “SOME” software that will allow you to scan paper. Some of them even come with object character recognition software (OCR). However, most of these software packages don’t include a way to create a text searchable PDF. What I’m talking about her is a PDF that has had OCR performed on the document. If you don’t know, OCR is a way for the computer to take a picture of a document, (I’m sure it does other things as well, but we’re going to stay on the document path for now) and “recognize” the “characters” in the “picture.” Most of the time when you scan a document, you are simply taking a picture of it. Even with PDF software, that is included with most scanners, it just provides for a picture PDF.

On the other hand there is OCR software. The problem with this type of software is that while it does a very good job of reading the characters on the page and making a text file, you loose all the formatting, graphics and “style” of the page. With most OCR packages, you simply have a text file of the contents. This works for some applications, but it doesn’t really work well for archiving large numbers of documents, because you might have to reproduce a copy of a document some day. With OCR, you could recreate the CONTENTS of the document, you can’t create a duplicate of the document. This is where Acrobat Pro comes to the rescue.

Acrobat Pro has OCR build in, and you can specify it to run as part of the scanning process. By selecting the check box you see in Acrobat, you can make all your scanned PDFs text searchable. This has the awesome benefit of allowing you to find that cable bill that you need to pay before they turn off your Internet connection, or some other paper document that you have misplaced but really need a copy of. I have scanned just about all my documents. However, I will admit that keeping up with the scanning can be incredibly time consuming if you have a flat bed scanner. I had a sheet fed scanner that died after 4 years of use and it was easy and quickly to scan something. My next scanner will be the Fujitsu Snapscan S510M.
This scanner does 18 pages a minute, duplexed and includes a copy of Acrobat Professional for the Mac. It’s a great value to get those documents out of your hair.

If you are looking for a more portable solution there is the DocketPORT 485 for a duplexing solution or the DocketPORT 465 if duplexing doesn’t matter to you. These scanners don’t come with Acrobat Pro, but they are very good scanners, the sheet fed that died was a previous version of this scanner, and they are very portable. They run off of the USB 2.0 power so you don’t have to worry about carrying around an extra power adapter for it.

Of course the last step in the Scan it and Shred it is the shredding part. This is easy and just about any shredder will do. However, I prefer one that has crosscut so as to further ensure the destruction of the document. One important thing to remember is that you want to double check that you have the document saved and it’s the way you want it in the system. After you shred it, the document is gone for good.

Anyway, hope this helps and good luck getting rid of all that paper.

MacUpdate has started their second promo. Currently it sits at 7 applications for a total value of $234.80 for $50.00US. If they sell over 1000 of them they will increase it and one of the programs on the list is $300.00 retail. So if you are looking for some great software, Rapidweaver, and Yep! two of my favorites are on the list, go snatch it up.