Take Control of Your Paperless Office

Join Joe Kissell as he helps you clear up the chaos of an office overflowing with paper. With Joe’s guidance you can develop a personal clean-up strategy and choose your Mac-compatible tools—a document scanner and the software you need to perform OCR (optical character recognition), devices and services for storing your digitized documents, and tools to categorize, locate, and view your digital document collections. Once you have your gear in hand, Joe then shows you convert your paper documents to digitized files and gives you ideas for how to organize your office workflow, explaining how to develop the day-to-day techniques that reduce the amount of time you spend pressing buttons, launching software, and otherwise managing your war on clutter.

In addition to all of the above, Joe clues you in to these paper-reducing tasks and skills:

• How to scan or photograph documents you find while out and about—business cards, receipts, menus, flyers, and labels—so that you keep only digitized versions. Joe discusses a variety of mobile scanner options, with particular emphasis on using a camera-equipped iOS device, and lists similar options for employing Android and BlackBerry smartphones.

• How to create a digitized image of your signature so that you can create, sign, and share documents digitally, rather than printing them for the sole purpose of signing them with a pen.

• How to set up your computer to send and receive faxes so that you can avoid using a physical fax machine with paper input and output. Joe describes both using a fax modem and taking advantage of various online fax services.

• How to use common techniques for reducing paper—paperless billing, online bank statements, and more—and less common practices, such as using paperless postal mail services and check depositing services. Joe also gives effective tips for reducing the amount of catalogs, junk mail, and paper that you receive.

What’s New in Version 1.1
In the roughly eight months since the initial version of this ebook was published, a number of significant developments have occurred—new OCR and scanning products have been released, Apple has unleashed Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, and readers have written in with suggestions and corrections. This version brings the book up to date and corrects some oversights, but keeps all the basics intact. We plan to release a more substantial revision of the book at some point in the coming months.

The major changes in version 1.1 are these:
• Included information on the new Thunderbolt interface; see Disk Capacity
• Added information on several iVina BulletScan scanners and the new Fujitsu ScanSnap S1100; see Pick a Mac-Compatible Scanner
• Made several additions and clarifications to the list of OCR software (see Pick a Mac OCR Package), including a new sidebar on OCR in the Cloud
• Added two more document manager options; see Use a Document Manager
• Overhauled the information on automating OCR with Acrobat Pro to work with Acrobat X Pro; see Acrobat Scripts
• Added several new iOS apps that offer OCR; see Pick an iOS OCR App
• Explained how to use the new version of Preview in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion to digitally sign a PDF; see Add a Signature with Preview in Lion
• Included a new sidebar about desktop, iOS, and Web apps that let you sign a PDF with your fingertip, mouse, or trackpad; see Sign without Scanning
• Noted that Lion no longer supports the Apple USB Modem for sending and receiving faxes; see Use a Modem for Incoming Faxes