PDFpen. A life recorded in bits and bytes. Gordon Bell never forgets. That's because, since 1998, he has been working on archiving his entire life. That includes everything he has accumulated, written, photographed, presented, and owned. Bell, a principle researcher at Microsoft Research, has now written a book about how in the future we may all be able to offload our own memory into a comprehensive e-memory. His life is kept in a database for a project called MyLifeBits. Bits 'n' bobs In an interview with the BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme, Mr Bell explained the motivation behind his unique and intriguing work. "We started out to see just how much information one had coming through their life," he said. "I have a reasonably complicated life - so I wanted to find out just how many bits were coming and going, and how to deal with it.
" All computer users tend to archive some parts of their life, whether it's an e-mail, a written document or a photograph. "Overall I think there are maybe a million items all together," he said. What Software Do I Need ? Possibly None It could be that you already have all the software that you need. If you have a ScanSnap or other scanner, it will come with software to scan and possibly even convert it to a searchable PDF. It might even come with some simple document management software. If you have an external backup like a MyBook or a Time Capsule, it might already have software to do backups for you. However, if you want to “take things to the next level” and have a full document management workflow, there is software out there that can help. Manage Documents Like A Pro Mac users are spoiled for choice when it comes to document management software.
DEVONthink Pro Office DEVONthink is called a “Personal Information Assistant”. It manages documents and classifies them and files them automatically, and has very advanced OCR and searching technology . It automatically takes documents from the ScanSnap and turns them into searchable PDFs. Yep PDFPen For Windows users one solution is Microsoft OneNote 2007. DocumentSnap.com - Manage paper - Scan It, Process It, Shred It, The real paperless office. Computers were supposed to make paperless offices possible, but most of us are surrounded by more pages than ever. It’s possible to break free from paper’s grip, however. I’ve developed a system that has allowed me to eliminate all but a slim handful of papers from my formerly bulging filing cabinets. I scan my documents and convert them to PDF files that include both high-resolution images of the originals (for reference and later printing) and—using optical character recognition (OCR) software—digitized copies of document text (so I can search, select, or copy it).
As a result, I have more free space on my desk and in my file cabinets, and almost every piece of paper in my erstwhile files—old tax forms, letters from my bank, and more, as well as new stuff that still comes in—is now searchable, easy to back up, and accessible from just about anywhere. Get the right hardware The first key is a good scanner.
While the ScanSnap is my favorite, you can find less-expensive sheet-fed scanners. Paper clutter begone, part 1. Three months ago, my husband and I hit our limit and knew that we had to get the paper clutter in our house under control. Our paper clutter problem has since been greatly reduced and I would like to share some tips for how we accomplished this task in a series of posts on the topic. Our filing cabinet was the worst of our paper monstrosity. Crammed into folders were papers that we wanted but didn’t necessarily need in tangible form. We knew that there were some papers that we had to keep in paper form — like mortgage documents, tax returns, and insurance policies — but finding them was next to impossible because of all of the other clutter.
Ultimately, we decided that we wanted our filing cabinet to only include those documents that were at must-keep status. To rid our home of the unnecessary papers, we invested in the Fujitsu ScanSnap (available for the Mac and PC) and scanned all of the papers that weren’t vital for us to have in paper form. Visit the whole Paper Clutter Begone series: Scan paperwork to PDF in one step with ScanSnap S300. Fujitsu 6140.