Archive files using document management software

It’s the 21st century and, along with the flying car, we’ve been cheated out of the paperless office. Anyone who has a computer knows that they tend to create more paper, not less. And with the bills, letters and other things that (still) arrive in the post, keeping on top of all your documents can be a nightmare.

If you run a business, or even if you just have to do a tax return, you’ll have to keep some paperwork for years, just in case it needs to be checked. All too often that means a storage box with something helpful like ‘Bank’ written on the side, and a pile of statements tossed into it.

But with scanners cheaper and more advanced than ever, and fast PCs capable of recognising text more accurately than before, it should ­ in theory ­ be simple to turn those piles of disorganised paper into a searchable database that lets you retrieve what you want, when you need it. In this feature, we’re going to find out how.

In the past couple of years, it has become increasingly common to see footers on the bottom of emails, asking people if they really need to print them out.

You might have thought it was self-evident, but over time, many people have got into the habit of keeping things on paper, sometimes to the point where older documents that we created on a computer aren’t available digitally any more.

They might, for example, be trapped in a file format that you are unable to read, or worse, they’ve been deleted and all that you have left is a paper copy.

When we had computers with tiny hard drives ­ 20MB wasn’t uncommon back in the 1990s ­ it made sense to delete things we didn’t need and keep a printout instead, in case you needed to refer to it later.

Now though, the balance has swung firmly in the other direction. Hard disk capacities are huge and many of us have plenty of space. So, far from deleting digital versions of documents because we need to free up the hard drive, it’s practical to go in the other direction, digitising information that exists only on paper.

And with today’s faster computers, together with plenty of space to store indices, it should be possible to search for things in the blink of an eye ­ potentially retrieving the information you want far more swiftly than rummaging through even a well-organised filing cabinet.