Piloting Evernote as a paperless office
I’ve started today to pilot Evernote Beta as my paperless office. It’s working well. This is what I did.
First I selected a bunch of paperwork that I wanted scanned in and keep in Evernote. I selected a folder of 20 2-sided credit card statements, documents I want to keep but I don’t need the originals of.
The plans was that after scanning and storing in Evernote, I would then shred the documents and have virtual copies of the documents stored in bits and bytes on my computer, and safely backed up in the cloud.
Paper to Evernote interface
I scanned the pile of 2-sided paperwork using the big high speed scan-to-email photocopier at work, literally a 2 minute operation in my lunch-hour. The 3MB PDF arrived seconds later in my mailbox. I clicked Forward, and sent it off to my Evernote email address.
Re-arranging in Evernote
Getting home tonight from work, I logged onto the Mac, synchronised Evernote, and saved the PDF onto my desktop.
I scurried around the net for a few minutes to find some way to break the file up. I found PDF Split and Merge, an open source app that both joins and splits PDF files.
I set PDFSAM to split the document every second page, to take into account the 2-sided pages I had scanned in. That created 20 individual PDF files, each 2 pages long.
Add to Evernote
I created a notebook for the credit card statements, nicely titled with the name of the prestigious financial institution, and then dragged the files into the Evernote left hand window.
I spent a few minutes renaming and dragging the files around to get them in order.
Backing up into the cloud!
I pressed Synchronise, and my paperwork was safely sucked up into the cloud.
I then tore the statements to pieces. Lets hope I can trust the Evernote (Beta!) back-up system!
Issues?
Only issue - the size of my Evernote Beta installation now … rapidly approaching that 200MB quota. This pilot may have to remain a pilot for a while ….
Tags: Evernote, Evernote Beta, Go paperless, Live with minimal stuff, Paperless Office