Comments on: Paper clutter begone, part 1

By: Nick

Nick — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:22:32 +0000

In the article “My favorite organizing magazines” (http://unclutterer.com/2008/06/18/my-favorite-organizing-magazines/) you write that you “pull out all of the articles, scan them”, but this scanner seems to only be able to read single sheets of A4 paper. Do you cut out all the pages in the magazines before scanning them?

By: Ashish Ahuja

Ashish Ahuja — Sun, 18 May 2008 11:14:36 +0000

Thanks for the information. Will use it to de-clutter my office

Regards,

CA Ashish Ahuja, FCA
A Roaming Blogger and a CA
Indian Chartered Accountant New Delhi India
Indian Company Formation Delhi India

By: Catherine

Catherine — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:21:50 +0000

Thank you for linking back to this article from the main page. I just purchased the ScanSnap S300, which seems to be a newer, highly portable version of the same product. It retails for $259, and scans a bit slower, I believe, but still! And I was inspired by the “getting rid of change” Unclutterer post, also an older one, to round up all of my change and take it to a Coinstar machine at the grocery store. I used my $80 of spare change to get an Amazon giftcard (thus, avoiding the Coinstar service charge) so my ScanSnap only took $180 off an actual credit card!

Unclutterer rocks.

By: RashidVille » Blog Archive » Unclutter your paper & Lug a Mug

RashidVille » Blog Archive » Unclutter your paper & Lug a Mug — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:53:23 +0000

[...] has been directly inspired by Unclutterer… Unclutterer issues that buying a Fujitsu ScanSnap is a great idea to unclutter one’s [...]

By: Unclutterer » Archive » 2007 Gift Giving Guide: Ultimate generosity

Unclutterer » Archive » 2007 Gift Giving Guide: Ultimate generosity — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 14:31:22 +0000

[...] but there is also one for the PC). I purchased it while doing research for Unclutterer’s Paper clutter begone! series, and continue to be fully satisfied with the purchase. It is definitely the single best [...]

By: Unclutterer » Archive » Reader question: How to store favorite correspondence?

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 14:23:17 +0000

[...] Angela, you have a few good questions here about how to store mementos. As you anticipated, I do support letter scanning and photographing objects like birthday and holiday cards, ticket stubs, playbills, etc. I’ve written about this idea a few times in the following posts: Photographing your mementos and Paper clutter begone. [...]

By: Mark Moline

Mark Moline — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 16:59:05 +0000

I’ve been using our scansnap since January to slowly get all our paper clutter under control. The scansnap is a professional document scanner. It is purpose-built…and it shows. A regular flatbed will never match the speed of the scansnap. A multi-use device (even with duplex scanning) will never match the scan quality or ease of use.

Ease of use is key. If it’s not easy to use you won’t use it. This thing just sits on your desk waiting for you to lift the cover and scan. No setup. No launching special apps. Just insert paper, press the button. A few seconds later you’ve got a PDF.

I’ve been using it with Yep (http://www.yepsoftware.com/) on the backend and it’s fantastic. You don’t need Yep, it just makes everything that much better, especially document retrieval. Yep lets you assign tags to the documents which makes it much more useful than just filing them away in a hierarchical folder structure.

One last comment on paper clutter, avoid paper if you can. Now that there’s an official place to store the electronic versions of our documents I feel better receiving all my bills this way. I get bank statements emailed as PDFs, credit card bills come in as PDFs, same with our insurance bill. Now I can just file those PDFs right along side all the scanned paper. Now there’s even less clutter!

Can’t say enough good stuff about the scansnap and Yep. Nothin’ left to do but :-) :-).

By: Metaphors

Metaphors — Thu, 31 May 2007 17:23:51 +0000

Now if only I could get rid of Scanner Clutter. I don’t want this hulk in my house permanently.

By: Metaphors

Metaphors — Thu, 31 May 2007 17:23:34 +0000

Now if only I could get rid of Scanner Clutter. I don’t want this hulk in my house permenently.

By: PJ Doland

PJ Doland — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:27:11 +0000

It scans both sides of the page at once, and it comes with Acrobat. That’s how. This is a bargain for a duplex scanner.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 22 May 2007 09:52:01 +0000

$400 for a scanner?!? I mean. Really??!?!?
How do you justify that?

By: Ken Silver

Ken Silver — Tue, 22 May 2007 02:38:34 +0000

I went paperless with the ScanSnap back in August 2006. It was a complete success! Here's my blog article on the process along with some handy tips: http://kensilver.blogspot.com/2006/08/my-paperless-office.html

By: Erin

Erin — Tue, 15 May 2007 13:13:24 +0000

JoeJoe — I actually own a 3-in-1 scanner/printer/photocopier. The company that produces it, however, stopped updating drivers for the scanner portion of it almost six months ago. Also, my 3-in-1 device doesn’t scan both sides of the paper at the same time, it is considerably slower, and the quality of the scanner in the 3-in-1 device is well below that of the ScanSnap. The all-in-1 device is a nice idea, but it doesn’t have the quality of the ScanSnap.

By: joejoe

joejoe — Tue, 15 May 2007 06:04:59 +0000

And replacing a standalone scanner and standalone printer with one device should count for some unclutter too.

By: joejoe

joejoe — Tue, 15 May 2007 06:04:08 +0000

A neat idea, but it seems to me you can get a nice Laser printer All In One/Multifunction with sheet feeding scanner for less than the price of that Fujitsu.

By: Paige

Paige — Sat, 12 May 2007 05:27:30 +0000

I’ve been looking at the ScanSnap for some time now, but all the comments I’m seeing leave me somewhat confused. I currently use a flatbed CanoScan LiDE 500F with my PowerBook and it works great! I put my documents on the platen, hit the “PDF” button and the application automatically launches and scans my doc with my preferred settings (200 dpi, grayscale). For multipage docs, I put the new sheet in and hit the “next” button (or escape key), after the last one I select “finish” (or enter). Then the Finder opens with my just scanned document selected. It’s a fast, streamlined process and there is no need to open additional software. From what I’m hearing with the ScanSnap, though, it has to scan the doc, then open Acrobat for the OCR. Doesn’t seem as slick as the Canon’s one-pass deal. But I am ever so tempted with the sheet feeder and double-sided scanning of the Fujitsu! P.S. I already own Acrobat Standard 7.0, so paying full price for the ScanSnap isn’t that enticing. I wish that had a cheaper version without the software for those that already have it.

By: inlimbo

inlimbo — Thu, 10 May 2007 14:29:01 +0000

Thanks for the quick reply Erin! The Fujitsu ScanSnap is now in my wishlist!

Thanks again,
inlimbo

By: Erin

Erin — Thu, 10 May 2007 13:26:53 +0000

inlimbo — Yes, it does have OCR capabilities. The product ships with a version of Acrobat. I use it, and the OCR function, daily.

By: inlimbo

inlimbo — Thu, 10 May 2007 12:41:22 +0000

I’m confused. Does it support OCR? Tim Robertson’s MyMac.com Review on Amazon states that it doesn’t.

By: Russ Urquhart

Russ Urquhart — Tue, 08 May 2007 20:57:55 +0000

HI,

I had tried something similar to this a while back. I have a flatbed scanner attached to my Mac and I was using an OCR program (Readiris). My goal was to be able to scan and ocr a magazine article, and then store that as a searchable pdf, that retained the look of the original article. (Allowing me to throw away the paper version.)
I had spotty results. Somethings ocr’ed better than others.
I’m curious as to the specifics of your scanner settings and how that worked, e.g. what resolution did you scan your articles in? Did you keep any protographs in those articles? How well did the pdf generated match the original?

I appreciate any help!

Thanks

Russ