Scanning Home Office Files

Let’s face it, we’re all surrounded by paper. From our bills to information we print from web sites to keep as a quick reference, we are addicted to paper. There’s a way to control that paper flow, and in the process give yourself some very nice benefits: Go paperless.

Scanning technology, or Document Imaging, has been primarily reserved for medium to large companies. Their main intent to was either relieve the cost of storing large amounts of historical paper data, or increase access to their important paper-based data. Changes in technology, and Microsoft’s inclusion of some basic imaging features, have made the home office, or just plain home, able to take serious advantage of this space-saving, time-saving technology. So how does one get started? Simple, purchase a document scanner, or use what you already have.

Chances are, if you have a home office, you have an “all-in-one” type printer. This device is designed to print, fax and copy. Guess what, if it faxes, it probably has some scanning functionality. So what does that mean? When sending a fax, the paper is translated into lines of data that can be sent across a phone line as a series of on/off signals representing data that is either black or white. Actually, the data is compressed first, then that representation is sent across the line, but all you need to know is that the fax machine uses the exact same technology used when scanning office documents. This is distinctly different than scanning photographs. Color scanning is slower and requires large amounts of memory and storage space. Black-and-white scanning, on the other hand, creates files that are very small, typically between 30-50Kb for a letter-size page. Roughly 13,000 “images” can be stored on the size of a CD. If you have a recent PC, you have enough storage space to store ALL your monthly bills, tax documents, mortgage papers, etc. for the rest of your life. The great benefit to this is, when you have your files scanned this way, it’s easy to make a CD of your files, and store it in your safe-deposit box at your bank, or upload them to a secure provider, insuring that you will not lose your critical data.

The file format for this type of scanning is called “TIFF” or “TIF”. It stands for “tagged image file format” and is a standard that has been around as long as fax machines have. It also generates a true representation the document scanned, unlike JPEG formats used for color photos. Windows recognizes the .TIF file format and will display the image for you. If you have Microsoft Office installed, especially the newer versions, you can actually open the file and use a built-in option called “OCR” (Optical Character Recognition) to convert the image to readable text. There’s even an option to export it to Word. It’s a great way to translate a piece of paper you have in paper format to text, something that you could edit on the computer. It’s a lot faster than typing the document.

The basics: Get a scanner. Your office “all-in-one” needs to support something called TWAIN. TWAIN is an interface for scanners and is found in many applications, enabling the user to scan a document direction into that program. Adobe products use TWAIN (among other sources) to pull in scanned images. Whatever scanner you purchase will have it’s own scanning software. Follow the instructions, and you should be able to scan and view your image in no time. Make sure you have software that allows not only PDF scanning, but TIFF scanning as well. Although PDF is very popular, and can be very useful, TIFF is the standard and is a more stable, open format. While PDF pretty much limits you, and chains you to the Adobe Corporation.

Scanners range quite a bit in terms of speed, size, functionality and quality. The rule of thumb is similar to when buying a digital camera, you want the best optics. The “optics” in a scanner are the camera, or cameras that take the picture of the document that’s being scanned. You want one as versatile as you are. If you also want to scan color photographs, find a scanner with color capabilities, but generally, use the black and white scanning speed to rate the quality of the machine. Better scanners scan faster, as a rule of thumb. Get the fastest one you can afford, it will assure that your monthly, or bi-weekly scanning task doesn’t take much time at all. Xerox and Visioneer both make great low-end quality scanners that are USB-based and easy to use and install. Also make sure you choose a scanner that supports the type of operating system you have. Check the box for compatibility, it will say the versions of Windows it supports, the minimum requirements, and how it connects to the computer. USB is preferred unless you really know what you are doing with computers.

The basic idea here, is to scan your files, and store them on your computer. Think of it as taking a picture of your paper files. This way, like a file cabinet, if you need to reference your file, say last month’s phone bill, you can quickly find it again. Now comes the hardest part: Figuring out how to organize your filing system. These can be as complex as you like, but I prefer to keep it simple. If you already use the “My Documents” folder for your documents, either use that as your file cabinet, or create a new directory and call it “Scanned Files. Inside of this, you can either store all your files in this single directory, or you can create a directory for each company you deal with. For instance, a directory for your phone company, one for your cable company, etc. I simply use one file directory, and make sure I name my files according to the company and month so I can find it again. So my July AT&T; phone bill will be called: ATT_July_2006.tif. This way, if i need to find my phone bills, I simply change the default sort of the directory to “name” and start looking through my AT&T; files. Further, if I need my receipts from a certain month, a date sort option gives me an easy look at all my files for that month.

You may be asking yourself, “Surely there’s more to it than this?” To which I answer simply, “No, it’s that easy, and quit calling me Shirley”. If you are familiar with how to change the name of a file when you store it, you will be able to change the file names of your images. The “Save As” menu option will prompt you for a file name.

Once you have gotten comfortable with storing paper this way, the next step I recommend is to print your online files and receipts to TIFF or PDF. When I pay my bills online, for those that I cannot pay via my bank’s bill pay options, I print the receipts from the company website to a PDF. I have a free PDF printer from a company called Software 995. It’s called, PDF995, and it’s free and easy to install. The crux of what it does is, from any application you can print from, you simply choose the PDF printer as your option, and you get prompted for a filename. You have to click on “use the sponsored version” which means there’s a quick ad thrust upon you, but it’s only one window, and it’s easily closed. I use the PDF creation here to keep records of all purchases I make online, and name them so I can find them again.

Finally, as part of your complete electronic package I recommend that you burn a CD/DVD each month with all your files. This gives you a backup of all your bills, mortgage papers, anything you have scanned, in the case of a disaster. Take that CD/DVD to your bank, and put it in your safe-deposit box. Next, get an online storage account. I use ibackup.com. For $9.95 per month, they give me 5 Gb of storage. That’s about 7 CD’s worth of data. This data is secured in my own account, and I can access it from anywhere. It’s come in pretty handy when I’m on the road, thousands of miles from home, and I have a question about my electric bill. If you don’t want to store all the files as they are, and are worried about security, grab Winzip or Winrar online for cheap, and you can create a single compressed archive file that contains all your files. You can even encrypt and password protect if you like. I don’t ever feel the need to be that secure. If you get into my bank vault and take my backup CD, I guess you can have my bank account number and phone number.

This is just the tip of the iceberg with electronic document imaging. As our society becomes more and more reliant on digital content, one can imagine how important it will be to keep records in this manner. Eventually, we will receive bill and information electronically from all the companies we do business with. About half the companies I deal with now send me some sort of important data by email notification. Those files are electronic, too, and just as easily saved as my scanned bills, tax documents, and receipts. The best part about this is, you can get rid of your bill box, and destroy your paper versions. You just don’t need the originals. Ever. Even the IRS will take “Facsimile copies” of your records, which is exactly what your scanned images (in TIFF file format) are.

Reference:

• Xerox Document Scanners