Quick Paperless Update
June 8, 2008 · Print This Article
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My paperless experiment is going well. Most of my incoming paper gets filed in DevonTHINK and I’ve been very happy with the the results. DevonTHINK will let you do stuff like put the same file in two folders. Once you get a number of documents in the right folders, DevonTHINK can automatically suggest where to put new incoming documents. This is surprisingly helpful and extremely accurate.
The ScanSnap is good with flat paper, but sometimes has trouble with items that have been folder (think anything that comes in the mail). I’m contemplating looking for a higher end scanner just to simplify the scanning process. It isn’t bad, but it isn’t a smooth as I’d like it to be.
Are you aware of a Windows equivalent to DevonTHINK?
@Steve – No, I’m not. You might checkout 42Tags.com. They seem to be tag based which I think is slightly less effective and I don’t think they have the auto-categorization feature. They do have a free trial. If you try it out, I’d love to hear what you think of it.
Good stuff, Mark! I had gone paperless when I decided to use paper-based task lists again, but I think paper task lists work so well specifically because it’s the only paper I deal with. Otherwise, I’m still paperless. That one quarter-of-a-page a day is all I use!
Hey Mark,
I recently toyed around with Devonthink, but I didn’t really like the idea that it stored it’s data in some database. I could access the files by showing the package contents of the dtbase file, but when exporting directly from Devonthink, word files were converted to RTF, and it really made a mess.
I’ve now set up a A-Z folder structure which has worked really well in real life and use that.
I’ve also gotten used to quickly filing stuff using Quicksilver to move files around.
@Arjun – If you option click on the database and select “show files” you can see all of your files in the filesystem. I agree that DevonThink needs better handling of Word documents.
I think you can use it to manage an existing folder (not in the database), but I haven’t played around with that much. I’m mainly using it for things that come in on paper so I haven’t done much with formats other than PDFs.
Yeah, I’m really looking for a single place to manage everything though, and the Finder seems to work well so far in this respect.
Hint: We’re working on DEVONthink 2.0 which will handle Word (and Excel, Powerpoint, OpenOffice, Pages, Numbers, Keynote) files just like any other file. No more mess. See here: http://www.devon-technologies.com/scripts/wordpress/?p=378
PS: I am the President of DEVONtechnologies, so I may be biased
@Eric – I know I’m looking forward tot he new version and hope it comes out in the near future.