Tools of the trade: your scanner

When I first started setting up my basement workshop, I remember reading articles that stated how the table saw should be the central machine, around which everything else revolves.

This is indeed true—not only does one often buy a good table saw before even looking into such things as band saws or jointers, but the machine takes up a huge amount of richly-deserved central shop floor space.

Such is the elevated status of the scanner in the arsenal of the paperless home. Without a scanner, you can certainly eliminate large amounts of paper by improving your selectivity of the stuff you keep vs. the stuff you shred, but the scanner allows you to eliminate almost all of the remaining pages as you archive them on your computer forever.

What scanner should you use?
This is a tricky question to answer. It is tempting to say “Use whatever one you already have,” but scanners and their software vary in features and performance, and they can be fidgety at times, especially older ones. If you have an ancient machine that your brother-in-law gave you five years ago that never really works right, you should consider investing in a new one.

Consider this: if it’s a real challenge to get the thing to work, you won’t make it past your first dozen receipts.

I recommend using a scanner that fits the following criteria:

• Scans to PDF
• Scans with the press of a button
• Performs OCR on the final document
• Doesn’t take an age and a half to do its job

Since most scanners are geared towards producing photographic-quality scans, you will never even begin to tax the image capabilities of even the cheapest scanner while scanning documents. The major factor will be speed.

Just as a woodworker should invest in the best table saw he can afford, I recommend investing in the best scanner for the job you can afford. (I have a strong opinion on this, which I’ll mention in a later post.)

One final note…

Remember that you are attempting to capture important paper documents in digital form prior to shredding them. Never forget this. Every decision you make regarding your hardware, workflow, backups, etcetera, should revolve around “How can I make sure that my documents are accurate and safe.”

If you have an opportunity to test-drive a scanner, print out the documents it generates and compare with the original. Can you read the fine print? Can you open them in Adobe Reader and copy text from them? Are you satisfied that you can destroy the originals?