Mac at Work

Chapter 19

The Paperless Mac

People have been talking about “going paperless” and transferring all their records to digital form for years, but this ideal has been largely unavailable to anyone except large corporations until recently. Fortunately, paperless technology is finally here for small and medium businesses. This chapter covers how to get your records into digital form and to use available Mac tools to sort and organize them.

Getting Paper Records on Your Mac

Transferring existing records to a digital format requires that they be scanned into the computer. For large corporations, there are commercial scanners and copiers that can process thousands of documents at a time. These devices are too costly for small and medium businesses. Likewise, digital conversion is not a job for a your traditional flatbed scanner: The scanners on your multifunction printer or flatbed scanner are slow and usually require that you manually feed each page (or limit you to maybe a dozen or so pages at a time). If the page is double-sided, you have to scan it twice. Although flatbed scanners are great for getting high-resolution scans of photographs, when scanning multipage documents, they are unworkable.

Instead, you need a dedicated document scanner. Just not the expensive types that large companies use. Some of the best paper digitizers on the Mac platform for small and medium businesses are the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners.

The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M ($500; http://scansnap.fujitsu.com), shown ...