Paperless progress
2020-02-14 Filed in: (soft|hard)ware
DEVONthink Pro Office is one of
many in the very crowded space of document
organizers / archivers. They announced the 2.0
beta a while back which caused me to look at it
again. And just now, there was a 2.0b3 release
with a long-awaited OCR upgrade. I was already
sold and bought a license last year. I also have
a Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M, which all by itself
combines a great set of features into a
very effective workflow.
Well... DTPO 2.0b + S510M are P H E N O M E N A L when used together.
It scans all my paper, from doodles to invoices to books. It converts text and inserts it invisibly into the PDF with all text indexed / searchable (and the big news in 2.0b3 is that the resulting PDF sizes are excellent). And now the biggie: DT can take these documents and auto-categorize them into different folders which already contain a few example documents.
So the workflow is: insert paper, push button, insert paper, push button, etc. Then as each OCR completes: enter some title (I just enter the main name / keyword, duplicate titles are fine). Finally, auto-categorize all documents in the inbox, and voilá; everything has been filed for eternity.
You can create “replicas” in DT to place a document in multiple folders, very much like a Unix hard link.
There’s a scriptlet which can be installed in Safari as bookmark, and since I’ve added it as 3rd item on my bookmarks bar, CMD+3 creates a web archive of the current page in DT (even with the bookmark bar hidden). There are also Dashboard widgets.
Again: auto-categorize puts these captured pages in a folder with documents most like it. And of course all documents can be found regardless of how they are organized, by entering a few characters in DT’s search box.
Did I mention how unbelievably effective this all is? Oh, yeah, I did ;)
PS. Other recent discovery I’ve started using heavily is DropBox. Syncing done right (uses Amazon’s S3). Bonus feature is automatic photo galleries, such as this one.
Well... DTPO 2.0b + S510M are P H E N O M E N A L when used together.
It scans all my paper, from doodles to invoices to books. It converts text and inserts it invisibly into the PDF with all text indexed / searchable (and the big news in 2.0b3 is that the resulting PDF sizes are excellent). And now the biggie: DT can take these documents and auto-categorize them into different folders which already contain a few example documents.
So the workflow is: insert paper, push button, insert paper, push button, etc. Then as each OCR completes: enter some title (I just enter the main name / keyword, duplicate titles are fine). Finally, auto-categorize all documents in the inbox, and voilá; everything has been filed for eternity.
You can create “replicas” in DT to place a document in multiple folders, very much like a Unix hard link.
There’s a scriptlet which can be installed in Safari as bookmark, and since I’ve added it as 3rd item on my bookmarks bar, CMD+3 creates a web archive of the current page in DT (even with the bookmark bar hidden). There are also Dashboard widgets.
Again: auto-categorize puts these captured pages in a folder with documents most like it. And of course all documents can be found regardless of how they are organized, by entering a few characters in DT’s search box.
Did I mention how unbelievably effective this all is? Oh, yeah, I did ;)
PS. Other recent discovery I’ve started using heavily is DropBox. Syncing done right (uses Amazon’s S3). Bonus feature is automatic photo galleries, such as this one.