Image credit: Jonathan D. Blundell
The paperless office has become a bit of a lame joke. We’ve been promised its arrival at every turn of the computer age, but there's still paper everywhere—or so it seems. Ok, we haven’t gone totally paperless yet, but we shouldn’t overlook the progress we’ve made. If you bank online, chances are you get your statement and cancelled checks in electronic format. Same with your quarterly 401(k) statements, receipts from online purchases, credit card statements. And let’s not forget reports, white papers, ebooks, and any saved newspaper and magazine articles.
Turns out, the paperless office is actually closer than we think. And the vast majority of these files are in Adobe’s PDF format. How do we organize PDFs in the virtual shoebox of our Mac’s hard drive so they’re easy to find when we need them? We tried creating a system of filenames to give us a hint, but found that we forgot the format when we needed it. We’ve tried elaborate folder structures, only to ignore them because we didn’t want to wade through that structure just to save a PDF email attachment. And while Spotlight works well for text-based PDF files, it can’t peek into any that come from a scanner.
But there’s hope. With just a few steps, your paperless files can be organized.
PART 1:
Add Annotations and Mark-Ups with Preview or Skim
The first step to organizing PDF files is to add relevant information. Is that receipt for a business expense? Which expenses can be billed to which clients? What’s the crucial passage in this 10-page article?
Luckily, annotating and marking up a PDF file is a cinch. Preview, included with Mac OS X, provides a nice set of tools. You can highlight, strike out, and underline in text-based files. Image-based files don’t allow text mark-ups, but you can still add ovals and boxes to circle things of interest. In all formats, you can add bookmarks and notes. Preview’s Inspector pane even lets you add keywords that will show up in a Spotlight search.
Preview lets you highlight, underline, and otherwise mark up the text inside your PDFs.
Skim (free, skim-app.sourceforge.net), the open-source PDF viewer, is similar to Preview but has a greater variety of annotation and mark-up options. Sticky notes and anchored notes provide greater flexibility for annotation, and arrows make important content stand out. There’s even a loupe to temporarily magnify a section of the document.
Skim’s snapshot feature is truly ingenious. We all know how annoying it can be to read a document onscreen and come across a reference to a table or a graph several pages earlier or later. In Skim, we just took a snapshot of the image and it popped up in a separate window, providing an easy reference. Skim also links to online databases via BibDesk (free, bibdesk.sourceforge.net), an open-source reference manager.
Skim offers even more markup options than Preview. (Click to embiggen!)
Skim's loupe lets you magnify a portion of text so it really stands out.
NEXT PAGE: Create an iTunes library of PDFs and tag them with metadata...
radarbob
February 17, 2010 at 12:42pm
I've been using YEP for over a year now. Hands down the best use I've made of a computer since I bought my first Macintosh.
THE PROBLEM
The time and drudgery of filing paper documents in a filing cabinet. The time and frustration of trying to find a document in a filing cabinet. The regret of having thrown away some doc a year ago. The angst of dealing w/ that pile of paper I've been avoiding because of the drudgery of filing...THE SOLUTION
YEP + Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner. Note: Fast & efficient scanning is an absolute must. Using a flatbed is too slow and clumsy. The goal is to get rid of paper. Document-centric scanning = Fast = efficient = painless.WHAT I DO
* Scan all my documents into Yep *AS PDF*, *quickly* tag, then shred. I keep certain originals of course: wills, birth certificates, etc.
* OCR some of the scanned docs. May do more of this; but my idea is an electronic filing cabinet, not an electronic reference and research system.BENEFITS
* I do not file anything. Using Yep interface: Between tags, file names, and OCR'ed text I can find what I'm looking for. OS X spotlight and finder searching complements.* All docs are PDF. If you've ever tried to open a decade old doc, you understand the significance of using PDF as the universal file type.
*Faster and funner for finding docs.
*No "keep or discard" decisions to make. Excepting junk mail, just scan it all; who knows when or if you'll want it.
* Easy to maintain. It's so much easier to scan-n-tag; so I do it.
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December 21, 2009 at 8:38pm
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sgallant04
October 08, 2009 at 9:50pm
Yep tears it up for me to. I'm anxious for Yep V2. I have not tried Leap yet as Ironic software seems slow to update.
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meytav
May 06, 2009 at 6:52am
it works great but i can not get back to my original library.what can i do?
tassiecelt
February 10, 2009 at 6:35am
The business of finding, opening and closing i-tunes libraries make this idea clumsy.
There has to be a better way - this for me is not it.
ssj152
February 09, 2009 at 6:02pm
Not all PDF files are restricted to one topic, as a letter might be. How do you reference the contents of such files - with a spreadsheet you create as you read the file? Not likely.JDWURTZ misses the point - these products allow you to add and edit metadata to PDF files without using names like TAXES_COMPUTER_2004_SOFTWARE_MICROSOFT_OFFICE_UPGRADE.pdf to name a file containing a receipt. What Yep does is to give you an expanded way to search any PDF file multiple ways <strong>without moving the file (uses your own location, optionally organizes by year and month) and uses the original file name. It allows you to ADD metadata like TAXES, COMPUTER, YEAR, SOFTWARE, etc. - what EVER you want to use - and later be able to add / edit / delete the metadata if or when desired. Yep will search the contents of a PDF and suggest keywords, but you are free to use any desired. It remembers all keywords you have ever used and shows the most used in a popup when you begin to add or edit the metadata. It is very simple in operation.Yep complements any other filing system in use or can provide one if desired. I'd like to see someone locate which issue of a digital magazine contained an article on a topic not on the cover - by filename or extension, while utilities like Yep make it easy to add all article topics as metadata (keywords) and find them in a search! The metadata of multiple documents can be edited at one time and Yep learns as it goes. As you can see, I'm sold on the idea and this product specifically.
jdwurtz@aol.com
February 07, 2009 at 3:19pm
If I understand the presumption of Michael Niemann correctly, there's some benefit to organizing my files according to file type, specifically when the file type is PDF.To expand slightly on this presumption, I would also organize all my MS Word files separately.Then I'd organize all my TextEdit files separately.Oh, I almost forgot, then I'd have to organize my TexEdit+ files separately.If I have any Pages files, they'd have to have a separate organizational structure also.Am I missing something here, or does this sound as absurd to you as it does to me?!?!I've been organizing my computer files by _TOPIC_ for over 30 years now, and that basic structure enables me to find files most of the time without any need for Spotlight.Please, please, please tell me what, if any, benefit there might be to organizing my files by file type!!!If I've got a MS Word file about how to calculate the natural frequency of a beam, and a PDF file about a slightly different approach to performing this calculation, your organizational approach would require me to place these two files in separate folders! No thanks!
ssj152
February 06, 2009 at 3:23pm
I bought a small scanner and downloaded a trial of Yep to test it with. Yep is easy to use, both as a program to input data from a scanner and as a method of organizing the data. I immediately purchased Yep and have been very happy with it.I organize all sort of PDF files with it: scans of receipts, tax documents already in PDF format, other documents I'll use at tax time that I've scanned, my entire digital magazine collection, manuals, etc. I print all purchases made on the web as PDF documents and file them with Yep by year, type and description. Yep makes key-wording easy.Highly recommended ($34), and also available at a discount with its big brother program "Leap", which organizes ALL filetypes. The author, Ironic Software (www.ironicsoftware.com) sells a package where you purchase Leap for $59 and get Yep and another program Deep, for only $10 extra. Deep is for organizing images - pictures, etc. and does it by color palette and size or shape.I do not work for Ironic software and have no relationship with them other than using Yep and having tried Leap, which I plan to purchase soon.
