What should you have in your toolbox?

 

A list of several useful hardware and software tools with which to arm yourself before you attack the file cabinet.

When I first became interested in woodworking, I checked out several books on the subject from the library. Invariably, within the first two or three chapters, there was an illustrated list of desirable hand tools for a woodworker’s workbench.

No one ever actually goes out and buys everything shown on those pages; they start with the essentials and build up a collection over time. And so it is with this list I give you of useful tools of the trade.

Staple Remover

Such a simple little device, but so important. My wife staples everything together, then she hands me a stack of old bills to be scanned in, complete with staples.

Don’t bother with those ones that have jaws. Get one of the stick kind, like this one.

Paper Cutter

I wouldn’t buy one unless I had lots of manuals and such to scan, but this is a device that can really speed things up. Just remove the staples from the spine and then start chopping through the centers of the pages, in small stacks.

If you have too much work for a paper cutter, you can always take the manuals/magazines to a professional office center and have them do the job.

Paper shredder

It’s a sad commentary on modern times that most people these days have a paper shredder in the house. Yours should be strong enough to do the job without overheating and should chop the paper into proper tiny bits.

Flatbed Scanner

This is where everyone starts. Nobody goes out and buys a sheet-fed scanner as their first scanner; the price is often prohibitive, and the devices are very task-specific.

Even if you have invested in a sheet-fed scanner, it is good to keep a flatbed scanner around to scan in things such as hard book covers or pages that you don’t want to remove from a book.

Sheet-fed Scanner

The most important part of a serious document scanning exercise.

The ability to scan in twenty or thirty pages in a minute, both sides, makes this expensive device stand head and shoulders above all flatbed scanners.

I use the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M.

You might want to check out Terry White’s Tech Blog’s comparison of the NeatReceipts, ScanSnap S300, and ScanSnap S510M. He did a great video showing the three in operation.

OCR software

Without OCR software, your documents are not searchable. Fortunately, most scanners come bundled with some kind of OCR software. Mine came with both Abbyy FineReader as well as Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.

External backup drive

So important. Your data has to be in two places.

Backup software

Sure, you can manually copy files from your desktop to the backup drive, and I did this for a long time. It’s better to automate this process.

Backup software helps prevent accidental erasure of either the source or the target data, and it helps you perform the backups regularly and painlessly.

I personally use rsync scripts to do the job, though this may be a bit too geeky for some. Many external hard drives come bundled with quality utilities. You can even consider using online backups such as Mozy or Carbonite.

PDF editing software

A definite plus once you begin scanning larger documents. You want to be able to merge documents, rotate pages, and move pages around with ease.

For example, I just finished scanning in a tri-fold owner’s manual that I cut on the folds. The first sheet had page 1 and 6 on it, the middle sheet had page 2 and 5 on it, and the last sheet had page 3 and 4 on it.

When the document went through the scanner, I had a PDF with 1,6,2,5,3,4 page order. It was a breeze to drag the pages into the correct order.

I use the Preview app from Mac OS X for this. Adobe Acrobat does the job quite nicely as well.

Document Management software

This is the repository where you keep your documents. I have mixed feelings about document management software.

On the one hand, these products are very good at what they do and they certainly make it easier to organize documents.

On the other hand, as soon as you commit yourself to one document management tool, it is difficult to migrate your collection to a new tool, should you need to switch in the future.

That said, I use a tool called Yep for this purpose. One of the other major players out there is DEVONthink.

Keyboard macro software

I find myself doing certain repetitive tasks from time to time that require multiple clicks or keystrokes. For example, when I am reviewing a scanned document, I scroll through the document looking for pages that were accidentally rotated 90 or 180 degrees by the scanning software.

The tool I use for previewing and editing (the Preview app from Mac OS X) supports rotating single pages, but it asks you each time “Do you want to rotate the current page only or the entire document?”

After tiring of clicking through that question every time, I used my macro software to write three keyboard macros, and I assigned them to ⌘-Left, ⌘-Right, and ⌘-Up, for Rotate Left, Rotate Right, and Rotate 180. Now I can quickly browse through a document, flipping and rotating any pages that need it.

I use Keyboard Maestro for this job.

File management utilities

As soon as you start juggling hundreds of files around and renaming them and moving them into different folders, you find yourself performing certain repetitive tasks, that can often be made easier by software.

I use a tool called A Better File Renamer for the Mac that allows me to rename large numbers of files, following dozens of customizable rules. This tool allows you to package renaming scripts into a “droplet” on the desktop, where you can drop files.

One of my droplets adds the file creation date to the filename as a prefix. Another droplet converts filenames with embedded dashes and underscores into “title case” names with spaces.

I recently bought a folder management utility called The Big Mean Folder Machine that allows easy creation of folder hierarchies, such as by automatically splitting files into groups of 100. I haven’t used it much yet, but I sure love the icon!

Encryption utility

Gotta have it if you are putting your intimate personal information into digital form. Anything with your SSN or your credit card numbers should be protected. Remember, even if it’s on your home desktop machine, a burglar would take the whole machine, and happily sift through your personal data looking for info that could be stolen.

For some things I use encrypted volumes on Mac OS X; for others, I use TrueCrypt.

Assortment of Thumb Drives

What better way to move your digital documents around? They don’t even need to be that large. Cheap throwaway thumb drives these days have the capacity to hold a lifetime of digital documents. But make sure you protect sensitive data!

[Update: Added a link to Terry White's scanner review]