DT for paperless office

DEVONthink Tips
1

Hi,

I am a small business owner and I am drowning in paper. I want to set up a paperless office and while doing research for possible solutions, I came across DevonThink Pro Office.

From what I can tell, it seems to be a perfect solution to keep a paperless office going.

However, I am wondering how much I can expect from DT when I first start using it. I will have to transfer tons of papers (bills, invoices, statements, you name it) into DT. I will hook up a Fujitsu ScanSnap. Now here is my question:

How well does DT handle the incoming load if I start scanning papers (like 50-100 pages per batch)? Will DT recognize which pages belong to each other and create a single PDF for a 3-page invoice? Or will I get 3 single PDFs? Will I have to combine those three single PDFs into one? Can this be done from within DT?

I am not sure if I can really bring my problem across (not a native english speaker), but my point is basically this: I want to mass scan and not end up with either one huge PDF that contains 100 pages, and I also don’t want to end up with hundreds of single PDFs if they can’t be combined (take the 3-page invoice example). And of course I don’t want to spend weeks at the scanner because I have to create a new scan action for every single document (instead, I just want to dump as many documents on the scanner in one go as possible).

Sorry for the lengthy post, I hope you get my idea.

How will DT handle this? Does it at all, or do I need additional software like ExactScan and the likes?

Would appreciate any thoughts you might have on this.

Thanks
Sascha

2

In ScanSnap Manager Settings > File Options I set the output as PDF. If you click on the Options button you have the choice of having all the paper stacked in the hopper resulting in a multipage PDF. Indeed, by checking the option ‘Continue scanning after current scan is finished’ under the Scanning tab, multiple hopper refills (whether single-page or multipage loads) will be combined into a single PDF until the ‘Finish’ button displayed onscreen is clicked.

The other option under Settings > File Options is to have a new PDF created for each set of ‘n’ pages scanned. For example, if you have a number of 1-page 1-side documents, you can place a stack of these in the feeder, with the option set to produce a new PDF for each 1 page scanned. If you have a set of documents that are 2 pages but in duplex (front and back copy) you can insert a stack of these into the feeder and set for a new PDF for each 2 pages scanned.

A bit of planning would be involved in the above workflow. But you will save time and effort, and end up with smaller PDF file sizes, if you invest in some planning and organization time.

Yes, you can simply stack mixed documents into the feeder and create a single PDF containing all of them. But you will probably wish to separate out individual documents afterwards within your database, and that can be done. But that takes a bit of time, and you will find that re-saving the split documents will result in more disk space to hold the collection of separated documents.

If I’ve got some longer documents, say an 8, 25 and 27 page collection, I save time in the long run by inserting each into the feeder to produce individual 8, 25 and 27 page PDFs. The ScanSnap runs through scans of this size very quickly, and OCR is taking place in the background.

Note: IN DTPO Preferences > OCR I leave the ‘Set attributes’ option unchecked. I don’t want a batch scan to come to a halt with a modal message requiring me to enter information right then. I prefer renaming the searchable PDFs after they have been saved to a database. I rarely bother to enter attributes, especially keywords, in any case (that’s the whole point of having searchable PDFs). To rename a PDF after OCR, select , e.g., the article title, Control-click (right click), then choose the contextual menu option ‘Set Title As’.

3

Thanks Bill. It sounds like I need to spend some time on the process, but I will have a lot of help from the ScanSnap DT Pro combination. It can be done.

As for the ScanSnap itself, do you have some input for me on this as well? See the other thread I opened…

Thanks, appreciate it!