For many people the “paperless office” we were promised never seems to arrive. The reality, however, is that a paperless office is here today, if you want to take advantage of it.
If you still print emails, web pages, and other documents, you can stop now. There are better ways to keep track of your information and access it more quickly.
The Case Against Printing
Printing is costly and inconvenient, requiring often-expensive ink cartridges, printer paper, and new printers when that cheap inkjet printer inevitably fails. All that paper becomes clutter that must be properly organized, or you’ll never be able to find what you’re looking for. You can’t access it when you’re away from your office, you can’t search across it, and you only have one copy so you’re in trouble if anything ever happens to it.
Printing was necessary when computers were heavy bricks that sat attached to desks. But we now walk around with computers in our pockets, tablets that are about the size of a piece of paper, and cloud services that can back up and sync all your documents across all your devices. You can search for documents you’ve saved by the words they contain, so you don’t have to set up and master a complicated filing system.
How Not to Print
Many people still printing emails and web pages. We’ll try to offer some tips to guide you away from the printer, and into a new way of saving and organizing information that makes sense.
- Create a Digital File Cabinet: First, you’ll want to decide where you’ll save things, instead of printing them. It helps to have one consistent location where you save everything. We recommend a cloud service that syncs across all your devices, so you can access them on smartphones, tablets, and your PC. If you really prefer local storage, you could save your files to a single folder on your PC — but be sure to back it up. This will be less convenient as you’ll have to manually copy files to your other devices if you want to view them elsewhere.
- Print to PDF: Anything you might want to print — whether it’s a receipt, document, email, or web page — can be printed to a PDF file. First, you’ll need to install a PDF printer on your Windows computer. You can then go through the standard printing process, selecting the virtual PDF printer. You’ll get a file that you can store in your cloud-based document storage and share.
- Printing Emails: Emails can be printed to PDF in the same way. You could also try flagging them in Outlook, or adding them to a special folder, or assigning a tag where you can refer to them later. You can access these emails later from any device with an email client — no need for printing.
- Printing Web Pages: If you print web pages to refer to later, you can instead print them to PDF. You could also bookmark them to view them later (your bookmarks can sync across all your devices).
- Faxing Documents: Some calcified old businesses still demand faxes. You can use a service to send faxes over the web instead of printing and faxing
- When Someone Insists on Printed Documents: Sadly, some organizations still insist on printed documents. There’s just no getting around this. If they won’t take a PDF by email, you may have to print.
- What to Do with Your Old Paper Documents: It’s easier to shift to paperless on a “going forward” basis, instead of methodically converting all your old paper documents to digital versions — that can be a lot of work. You can scan old documents to PDF files with a scanner, or you can outsource the work.
Using Your Digital Files
Your digital workspace now has several advantages over paper:
- Backup: Your files are backed up if you’ve got an {e}Care backup license. If the worst happens, you won’t lose your important documents.
- Search: You can easily search across all your electronic documents to find documents you need without sifting through mountains of paper.
- Access Everywhere: Your documents can be accessed anywhere you are from a PC, smartphone, or tablet. If you’re out and need to look something up, you can do it from your smartphone rather than going home and digging through your papers.
- No Clutter: You don’t have to worry about storing, organizing, making space for, and decluttering your documents.
- No Printing Costs: If you don’t need to buy expensive ink, cheap printers, and piles of printer paper, you’ll save money.
Of course, some documents may be too sensitive to be stored online. In situations like this, you can always use encryption. People will need the password or key before they can access your documents.
If you have other questions about streamlining workflows and eliminating paper, contact eMazzanti to craft a solution customized to your business needs.
