Archive files using document management software

The olden days
Of course, document management, as this sort of thing is called, isn’t anything new. There have been tools for performing optical character recognition (OCR) available for ages and, at its simplest, you could just scan pages and organise the images and recognised texts in a collection of directories on your hard drive.

In the 1990s, various companies made attempts at more sophisticated systems, including some dedicated to particular purposes, such as business card scanning, with software that not only read the letters and numbers on a business card, but also attempted to interpret what part of a contact’s details they represented, filling in the appropriate fields in your address book.

OCR software improved too, allowing you to view the results of recognition and call up an image of the original page if there was a word that was suspect, so you didn’t have to go back to the original.

And products such as Visioneer’s Paperport scanner, which was designed to sit between your keyboard and monitor, allowed you to scan just about anything and then add annotations, making some form of basic document management accessible to most people.

But scanners were still expensive, and even more so when fitted with automatic document feeders (ADFs). Storage space was expensive and, with the slow processors of the day, recognising even well-printed text was tedious. If you had an archive of documents that you wanted to scan, or even more than a few a day, it would be a major undertaking for most people.

State of the art
Now, however, it doesn’t have to be like that. Whether you just want to keep a few important documents organised such as ­ insurance policies and receipts from online shopping, for example ­ or you have hundreds of documents that need to be indexed, it’s a lot easier than you might have thought to organise everything on the PC.

Modern document management systems can store documents in dual formats ­ both fully indexed text, side-by-side with an image of the original. So you can find the right piece of paper by searching, and then print out a facsimile if a hard copy is needed.