How to Have a Paperless Office

Stacks of documents have occupied your limited space? Or it makes you mad regularly that you cannot find the right documents you need among the piles of papers? In cases like these, you might want and need to make your office paperless. And computer is supposed to make that paperless office possible. But how? In this article, we’re going to talk about some paperless office solutions. To work better, just pick some of the tips below.

 

First, you should reduce the amount of coming or outgoing papers. It means, as it possible, you might ask your client or vendors to send you electronic invoicing, bills or even contracts. Now people can sign an electronic contract. What’s more, instead of print to paper documents, you can request your colleagues save documents in electronic format, like PDF, and then send to other people. It is achievable both on Windows and Mac OS X. On Windows, in Microsoft Word, you can save Word documents as PDF format by clicking “Save as”>”PDF”. On Mac OS X, every application that can print can save documents as PDF format. For example, once you open a .txt file with TextEdit, you can go to “File”>”Print”, click the “PDF” tab and select “Save as PDF”.

Second, for these existing papers you need to keep, you can use a scanner to have them scanned to images and store them on your computer. If you need to edit or copy from these scanned documents, you need an OCR tool to digitalize them. Here you’d better scanned papers to PDF format, because it is easier for you to find an OCR PDF tool. The OCR PDF tool I use is PDF Editor Pro for Mac. It allows me to edit the content on scanned PDF files and convert scanned PDF files to commonly use MS documents and EPUB. If you are in Windows, try PDF Converter Pro.

Tips:
1. If you have piles of documents to scan, just make a plan to accomplish the task. Start the task with important papers. Making paperless office cannot be done overnight.

2. If you follow the aforementioned tips, I am pretty sure you could work more efficiently and smoothly.