Swamped by a Sea of Paper? Computer, Scanner and Internet Can Bail You Out

Swamped by paper? Here are some tips to cut the clutter.

* Use your PC to consolidate information.

Even though I’m an online maven, I still read the print version of my favorite newspapers, magazines and professional journals. But when I find an article I want to save, I go to the publication’s Web site and download it. If you wanted to clip this column, for example, you could find it for free at https://wwwlatimes.com/smallbiz.

* Encourage people to send e-mail rather than paper mail. Aside from its being cheaper, I can easily store important messages on my PC and refer to them as needed.

* Organize your computer files. Both Windows and Macintosh allow you to create folders within folders. If you use Microsoft Office on Windows, your data, by default, wind up in a folder called My Documents. You can create folders in that folder for individual projects or clients.

You can also come up with creative naming schemes for your files. All of my clients have unique identifiers that I use for all their files. The file name of all the articles I write for the Los Angeles Times, for example, begins with LAT. So this file is called LAT Organize.Doc. If I need to find it, I can use the File Find command (in the Start menu) to search for all files that begin with LAT or those whose file names contain “Organize.” I can also go directly to the folder where I store this file and sort by date. Click on the View menu, then click on “modified.” The most recent files are on top.

* Use a scanner. We may be in the Information Age, but a lot of material still comes to us on paper, which is why a scanner is a good investment for any small business.

If your main use would be to scan receipts, newspaper clippings, contracts and other documents that are not bound, you should consider a sheet-fed scanner such as the StrobePro ($199) from Visioneer (https://www.visioneer.com).

The scanner, available for any Windows PC but not Macintosh, is quite small (2 by 2 1/2 by 11 inches) so it fits on most desks. The scanner comes with PaperPort software that lets you scan and organize your documents so you can easily find them on your hard drive by searching for key words that you encode into the document. PaperPort, which works with all scanners, is available separately for $49.95 from ScanSoft (https://www.scansoft.com).

Many scanners also come with optical character recognition (OCR) software that you can use to turn printed documents into computer text that can be read by any word processing program. This is a very efficient way to store information because text takes up little space on your hard disk. Using OCR software may not be efficient timewise, however. It takes a while to scan a document and let the OCR software recognize the text.

What’s more, it’s far from a perfect science. While modern OCR programs are pretty good at recognizing good-quality, computer-generated documents that are printed on white paper, they are less reliable with newspaper clippings, magazine articles and even some old typewritten documents.

Whatever filing system you use--whether it’s those old-fashioned steel cabinets that store paper or the magnetic ones that store computer files--be sure you go through it occasionally and get rid of material to make it easier to find the things you need.

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Technology reports by Lawrence J. Magid can be heard at 1:48 p.m. weekdays on KNX 1070. He can be reached at [email protected]. His Web page is at https://www.larrysworld.com or keyword “LarryMagid” on America Online.