Paperless Home

Some five years ago the so called "paperless office" buzz was aloud. We were about to stop using paper, going for electronic forms and electronic storage. Six years later the consumption of paper (at least in my office) is significant. Many printers swallow several boxes of paper weekly. Customers want printed reports, invoices and agreements. Often we print documents, because they are simply easier to read on paper than on LCDs. But there is one important difference - all the paper documents start their lives inside computers. So before they are printed, they already are in the electronic representation. This (electronic storage) is very convenient. Easy to backup, easy to replicate, forward, send over email, archive on CD...

Similar things started happening at home. The first important shift (in my case) was Citibank. They used to send me a statement once a month. That is one account statement and a separate credit card statement. I used to pick the letters from my mailbox, and file the statements somewhere on the shelves. The pile was growing and I really did not need all the papers. A couple of years ago they offered electronic delivery of account statements (in the form of a PDF document downloaded from their web banking application). How nice is that. No more papers... just two files a month. Unfortunately not all the institutions are as trendy as Citi. They keep on sending me papers. And I hate to store them. So not that long ago I decided to scan all those papers and keep them only in the electronic form.

For scanning I have been using my old faithful Canon FB630U flatbed scanner. The nice thing about this scanner is, it is powered by USB bus, so no extra power supply brick is necessary (BTW how many bricks do you have under your desk?). So whenever I had a lazy afternoon, I scanned some papers from the past and this way my shelves have room for flowers (or gadgets) now and all the documents are on my laptop's hard drive. It is not only more space on the shelves. Having all the documents with me all the time has many advantages. Every now and then somebody asks me for some crazy things. My tax ID (issued on paper), or a copy of my high school diploma, or my SQL training certificate. I have them all with me. On the hard drive. They are always just a "print" away...

After all the official documents have made their way to my laptop, I turned to my notebook. The paper one. I take lots of notes during meetings and conferences. I was trying to type them directly using this or that note taking application, but so far just a paper notebook with a standard pen has not been beaten. The question was, how to transfer the hand written notes to the computer, so that I could store them or send to other recipients. And here the latest gadget from PLANon - the RC800 came to the rescue. RC800 is a color scanner in a form of a pen. Just slide it down a page and it stores everything. Then connect over a USB cable and it offloads the scans (charging its battery at the same time). The thing really does work. So now all my handwritten notes go down to my computer in a PDF (or JPEG) format. With the Planon it is so easy to even scan the phone bills and used bus tickets (ok... I'm not going to go that far ;)