gDoc

I live in a small three bedroom Victorian semi-detached with my wife and three children (all under five years old). We love our home but over time the inevitable clutter collected has begun to seriously shrink our living space.

We’ve thought about moving to a larger home but that’s not practical with the current housing market. Another possibility was to transfer the clutter up into the loft but that’s just moving it around and would make it difficult to access. I decided that the best solution was to move some of my offline clutter into the digital world. After all, expanding space digitally is just a question of buying a bigger harddrive.

I started building a Media Center PC and moved our CD collection of photographs onto it. The PC helped me clear a number of my living room separates (e.g. CD player, DVD player and Video recorder) into one single device.

My office was the next target. I’d stored a lot of paperwork (bills, bank/credit card statements and letters etc.) in a large brown filing cabinet. My filing system was the paperwork building up on my desk and then eventually (on a damp weekend) we’d file it away in the big brown box.

I already had our gDoc Fusion product installed on my home computer (like a model employee!) and this allows me to easily assemble and modify electronic documents that I create. I looked around for scanning applications but decided to use the “Windows Fax and Scan” software that came with Windows 7 to scan the pages. This application was previously only supplied with certain high end versions of Windows Vista, but it now comes as standard with Windows 7 software. Together these applications gave me the ideal tools to do my digital filing.

My scanner is a simple home Multifunction Printer (MFP) and doesn’t have a sheet feeder, so I was prepared for the scanning part of the task to take some time. I started by taking a suspension file of credit card statements and scanning them in. I knew that it would be easy to correct any pages I had put on the scanner upside down and so I didn’t worry about the page orientation. Also, as I scanned I found there were a few stray pages from other sources (i.e. not credit card statements), again I didn’t worry about this as I could drag the stray pages to another file later. Removing the need to check what I was scanning meant that this stage was surprisingly quick and required little concentration.

Next I put the scanned pages into gDoc Fusion. I could have done this by simply dragging all of the scanned TIFF files into the “Document View” but this would create a large number of single page PDF documents. I decided to have a single document containing all of the scanned pages and therefore chose to use gDoc PDF Creator. I selected all the single page TIFF images and right-clicked, selecting “Print”. I printed from gDoc PDF Creator generating a single PDF. I dragged this file to the “Document View”.

Once all of the scanned pages were in gDoc Fusion “Document View” the rest was easy. I created some blank documents and dragged the stray pages into them leaving just the credit card statements in my main document. I selected all of the pages that I had scanned upside down and rotated them back to the right way round. I flicked through the pages in “Flick View” and made sure they were in date order. I set some security settings and saved the document to a folder on the Media Center PC. Finally, I had the satisfaction of shredding the original documents. 

In future, I’ll probably let new paperwork stack up for a month and then scan it. Adding new pages to the existing credit card documents is as easy as dragging and dropping pages. Having the statements filed away on the Media Center PC means that they are easy to find and flick through, which is useful when you need to discuss something with call centre representatives, for example. Finally, the statements are secure and backed up which reduces the likelihood of identity theft.

I still have more suspension files to move online but the plan is to have the filing cabinet gone by Christmas so we’ll then have an ideal place to put the family tree this year!