Paperless – Automate Scanned Articles Into Evernote

A catch word that has popped up more and more in the last couple of years is going ‘Paperless’. Obviously, the less of a need to use paper has a positive impact on the environment and to be honest paper generally equals unnecessary clutter right? So how do we minimize the use of paper.

Photo courtesy of: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rvoegtli

For both the above reasons, I am slowing adopting the concept of going paperless. With  with so much going on in our daily lives and our mental search engines often overflowing and failing to find important pieces of paper when we them,  why not store them electronically and let technology do the work for you. If you have read any of my previous posts you probably know by now that I’m a big user and supporter of Evernote and have been using the note taking service for close to five years. During that time I have tried to push the Evernote functionality to its limits to help make the service work for me, so at the end of the day I have less work to do.

An area that I wasn’t able to master for quite some time until recently is how to scan a document or photos into Evernote directly, without the need of an extra step of having to create a new note and then attaching the scanned material manually. This was especially difficult while working on my family tree and trying to capture all of the documents and put them into Evernote was quite time consuming.

Having searched on Google and read articles on the Evernote web site about how to scan documents into Evernote, the solution that was most apparent was to purchase a Fujitsu ScanSnap compatible scanner which has built in functionality to push scanned documents straight into Evernote.  Ultimately this looked to be the simplest way of being able to do what I had been trying to accomplish and was very close to making the purchase but after further searching I found a web site named Wappwolf. From reading about the site I found that Wappwolf is an automation service for Dropbox users to automate the use of moving files in and out of Dropbox and to cut down on manual work.  Considering I have a Dropbox account and one of services that I could automatically moving of files to is Evernote, I had a lightblub moment and figured that this might actually allow me to do what I have been trying to do with my scanned documents. After having tried it, I can happily say it works like a charm.