A real paperless office

Home Office Computing, July, 1998 by Jerry Cheslow

If your office is so overloaded with paperwork that you can't see your desk anymore, it's time to trade in your paperweights for an electronic archiving system. The keys to your clutter-free office are a scanner that has an automatic document feeder, coupled with a CD writer (also known as a CD-recordable drive). With the help of these two pieces of hardware, you can cram the contents of an entire four-drawer filing cabinet into a space five inches in diameter and just 1/20 of an inch thick.

Although scanners and CD writers have been available for years, improved technology and falling prices have now made them practical for even the thriftiest home office worker. Hewlett-Packard's ScanJet 5s, for example, recently sold for $130 after a $70 rebate, and comes with a 10-page feeder for scanning large amounts of paper in one sitting. Smart and Friendly's CDR-2006 Plus drive sells for about $350 in computer catalogs. Together, they come with the software necessary to create a document archive. Other scanners and CD writers are available at similar prices. And a 650MB CD-R disk costs a mere $2.

But does an electronic filing system work in real life? As a writer and graphic designer, I set out to answer that question by computerizing the contents of one 12.5-inch-wide, 24-inch-deep file drawer containing 1,434 typed pages and 474 pages of handwritten notes. Using my scanner's 10-sheet feeder, I scanned all of this into 22MB of hard-disk data, or about 1/30 of one CD. Eighty-four pages, a dozen original photos, and 1.5 inches of printed material were kept in their original form, filling just 3 inches of drawer space. When all was said and done, I saved a total of 88 percent in storage space.

The most difficult paper files to condense are those containing handwritten notes. When you scan a document at 100 pixels per inch, a full 8.5-by-11-inch page takes up 24K. This means that 27,083 pages, or more than 54 reams of handwritten notes, fit onto one CD. The equation gets even more attractive when typewritten documents are scanned and translated into electronic text via your scanner's optical character recognition (OCR) program. A letter-size page of double-spaced text takes up about 11.5K, meaning that more than 54,000 full pages of electronic text fit on just one CD. Since most typed pages are not full, the number that can fit onto a CD is actually much greater.

Although storing your paperwork on disks saves you valuable office space, creating an electronic archive can also be a cost-effective alternative to removable hard disks, such as Jaz, SyQuest, or Zip cartridges. A 1GB Jaz cartridge, for example, which costs $125, can easily be "dumped" onto two CDs, which cost $4 in total.

After I cleaned out my file cabinet, I went to work on freeing up my removable storage cartridges and disks. Using my CD writer, I transferred four 1 GB Jaz cartridges, one 1.5GB SyJet cartridge, and 17 100MB Zip disks onto 11 CDs, with room to spare. Given that Jaz cartridges cost $125 each, SyJet media cost $130 each, and Zip disks cost $13 each, I saved a total of $850 in freed-up media.

Finally, in addition to emptying your overstuffed file drawers, moving to a digital filing system gives you the ability to index and search for documents electronically. Although making insertions and revisions to existing documents can be tricky (either you have to type in your revisions or print the document, write your revisions by hand, then scan the updated file back into your system, optionally deleting the previous version), the time you save by not having to rifle through mountains of paperwork will make digitizing your important documents a worthwhile office project.

When he's not busy emptying his wastepaper basket, Jerry Cheslow is a freelance writer and graphic designer.