Scanning Old Files

One of the road blocks to starting a paperless office is the thought of scanning all of your old files and documents. That could represent years of old back files. Remember, a paperless office is another name for a content management system or document management system.

While starting your paperless office by scanning your old files is an option, it might not be your best option. There is usually nothing that forces you to have an exclusively paperless office. For example, you could keep the traditional paper files through 2004 and go paperless starting in 2005. You could also have a "phased" paperless office.

A phased paperless office might convert one function at a time to paperless. For example, sales orders might be the first set of documents to "go paperless". After that, you might convert Accounts Receivables to paperless.

Most of the old paper documents will be destroyed when the document retention period has run. Let's say that after 10 years, old documents are destroyed. Why would you want to spend hours or days scanning 9 year old documents that will be destroyed in 1 year?

There are some "permanent file" documents that will not be scheduled for destruction. Those old documents should be scanned into your paperless office.

If document storage is becoming too expensive to deal with, you might be able to find a service that will scan documents for a reasonable fee. Labeling documents by filename can be very time consuming. As long as the documents are searchable it doesn't make too much difference what filename you use.

Smart Disk by Bason Computer

I recently purchased a 60GB "Smart Disk" sold by Bason Computer. These are so small that they are ideal for taking backups from the office to an off - site storage. This is an essential procedure for a paperless office. The cost was around $110. That is not much more expensive than some tapes used in tape backup systems.

The bad news is that on one Windows 2000 Pro machine, the system would not recognize it.

On the other machine, the backup stopped because the disk was formatted as FAT32. FAT32 did not allow for a large enough file size. The solution would have been to convert the drive to NTFS. The drive would not format using NTFS.

Create Acrobat PDF Files Quicker

From both casual observations and timings I found a way to create PDF files quicker. This holds true for both Acrobat 6.0 and Acrobat 7.0.

Try to create as many PDF files from one source program at a time. Example, I have just downloaded 2 emails that I want to archive as PDF files. When I "print" the second email to a PDF file, that second PDF file takes much less time to create than the first PDF file. The emails are close to the same size. This holds true for MS Word, MS Excel and other source programs that I have worked with.

Strategy to take advantage of this situation: If possible, create as many PDF files you need from one source program at a time.

The specific running times are available in The Denver Tax Paperless Office Letter.

Acrobat 7 vs Acrobat 6

I have suggested that PDF files should be the primary file format for a paperless office. In most cases PDF files look like the orginals and the can be searchable. Even though there are numerous programs that can create PDF files, I still recommend using Acrobat for the paperless office.

Adobe recently came out with Acrobat 7. How much better is it than Acrobat 6? I have a detailed discussion about this in the most recent issue of the Denver Tax Paperless Office Letter (See the link on the right side of this blog.). Computer magazines have been impressed with Acrobat 7.0's speed. Some of this is an illusion and in many cases Acrobat 7 is faster than Acrobat 6. This is critical to the efficiency of a paperless office.

The illusion is the fact that Acrobat 7 starts quite a bit faster than Acrobat 6. This gives you a great first impression. In practice, you are going to start Acrobat soon after starting your computer, and you will keep it running until it is time to turn the computer off. For some, that would be once a day. For others, it might be as long as once a week.

The place where Acrobat 7 is faster than Acrobat 6 is in turning small source files into PDF files. I also noticed that for some large source files, Acrobat 6 is significantly faster than Acrobat 7! However, for most paperless offices you will be turning small source documents, like a letter in MS Word or a spread sheet, into a PDF file.

I recommend upgrading to Acrobat 7 for the reasons mentioned above.

Stay tuned! In a future blog I will give you a hint on how to make Acrobat 6 and Acrobat 7 work quicker.

Speech Recognition Software

I haven't discussed speech recognition software as part of a paperless office strategy. If speech recognition software works well, the office could be "keyboardless" as well as "paperless".

When visiting my dentist, the assistant was using speech recognition software. It was clearly a great time savings. Dropping the dental instruments to document an issue would take up plenty of time or would take a second person.

PC Magazine 6/7/05, pg. 52, discusses Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 8. It indicates a 95% recognition rate. That stikes me as pretty good. ViaVoice version 10 recognizes about 70% according to the same article.

I get frequent calls about paperless office issues. These calls are usually about scanners, software and PDF files. I have never been asked about speech recognition software. Speech recognition software sounds like a great concept if it can work.

Any comments on speech recognition software would be appreciated.

Readiris OCR Software

Good OCR software is a critical component when converting a scanned image to an Acrobat PDF file. Without OCR, the text in the file will not be searchable.

OmniPage and Abbyy FineReader have been the leading OCR software packages. In the 6/7/05 PC Magazine, pg. 52, there was an article about Readiris version 10. The article indicated that the prior versions of Readiris were only so-so, but the new version, Readiris Version 10, was pretty good.

Any comments on Readiris or other OCR software would be appreciated.