Evernote makes paperless storage a practical (and affordable) reality

I have spent years inching towards paperlessness.  My working papers have been paperless for over 10 years but the question has been what to do with all those bits of paper everyone else gives me.  Scanning seemed to be the answer but filing in a searchable way was a problem - this is now solved!

Evernote now offers a solution that costs from nothing up to $45 a year (yes free to £30 a year).  At its simplest, it allows scanned images to be flicked through like a paper file but it is much, much more powerful than that.

Key points about the paid for version:

• Invoices (or anything else) can be scanned as pdfs and are then searchable (Evernote uses optical character recognition (OCR) to 'read' douments)
• Electronic papers can be emailed in and are searchable
• Any part (or all) of a web site can be 'clipped' into a notebook - great for evidence of web transactions or for collecting research materials
• Notebooks synchronise with the cloud (and other machines/users if you wish) so it is more secure against loss than paper
• Notes can be accessed and stored by smart phone and Evernote will use OCR on photos of receipts and other documents

I have been using Evernote since about Dec 2010, gradually testing ease of use, reliability and different settings.  Following the purchase of a new scanner in May 2011, I really am ready to stop storing paper. 

In my opinion, with the right help, it should easily be possible to set everything up and learn how to use Evernote in a day.  This could be for a home office or SME office - accommodating up to about 5 ring binders full of paper a month.  

If you would like to investigate this more and see a demonstration, please send me an email at: michael@veale.org.uk

Disclosure: Michael Veale is a director of Smart Accounts Sussex Ltd and neither he nor the company has any financial links to Evernote (except using their software).  Evernote is easy to learn but if you would like to save yourself some time and effort, he would be interested to discuss providing training and set up assistance, for a fee.

Microsoft Office 365 Beta

I have started playing with a beta version of Office 365 beta.  This seems to be Microsoft's alternative to Google mail, Google Docs, perhaps Evernote and possibly Google Apps.  Normally it wouldn't be worth much time since I'm happy with Google and really happy with Evernote BUT this is Microsoft - if this provides an easy transition from desktop Office to the cloud, it could be really big.

First impressions
It's clean and seems easy to use.  There is a group home page (like a Facebook wall) that could be really useful for short updates to your team - it does not have comments though which limits its usefulness considerably.  Other tools are Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote.

Cost
The beta is free but the final version will be between $2 and $24 per user per month (that's $24 to $288 per user per year).  When compared to (free) Google Docs this does not seem to be good value for money - on the other hand, so many people are already comfortable with Office, they will probably pay to keep it.  It will depend how much of the advanced functionality will be available from the cloud (Google's spreadsheet is fairly basic).

Benefits
I expect the benefits to be in group working and file sharing.  I am here, you are there and this could allow us to work on the same document without having to email it back and forth.

Switching to Android

After careful consideration I have retired my Nokia E63 (mobile phone) in favour of an HTC Desire Z running Android.  I almost kept my Nokia for a few more years feeling the technology had matured - I could already phone/text/email/surf/sync calendars and what more could there be?

One week on, I can confirm that the difference is enormous.

Speed
The first thing I notice was the speed - especially when searching or using the internet.  The 'Z' is so much faster.

Ease of use
The multi-finger gestures really are intuitive - once tried they become obvious and make it so much quicker and more precise to scroll down a page.  By day 2, I caught myself with my fingers on my laptop screen trying to do the same thing.  Data entry is also easy - there's the on screen keyboard (landscape or portrait) both of which let you dictate your message if you prefer.  For normal typing, the gadget tries to make sense of what you are typing so even if you missed the correct key, it often manages to correct the word.  For typing email addresses and strange passwords, there is also the slide out physical keyboard which seems to work well.

Google
I have been a user of Gmail and Google Calendar for years.  They work well with Windows (using Goosync); they work reasonably well with Symbian (using Goosync) but the calendar would only sync by manually pressing a sync button.  With Android everything syncs oh so simply and almost instantly.  Multiple calendars are easy to use and gmail labels and folders sync too.

Available apps
One of my main reasons for moving from Nokia was that many PC apps that I wanted to use - such as Evernote (see earlier post) are not supported on Symbian.  Moving to Android has fixed this and there is so much choice of apps now available.

Screen
I knew that the screen on the 'Z' would be twice the size of that on the E63 but the resolution seems much sharper too.  It's easy to read conventional web pages by looking at the whole page first (to orientate yourself) then with a quick gesture zooming in on the part that you want to read.

Unresolved issues
The only issues that I have not found workrounds for so far relate to reminders.  With my Nokia, if you set an alarm call, the phone would switch itself on and give you the reminder - the HTC only gives you the alarm when you switch it back on.  With the Nokia, it was easy to make emails arrive silently and texts to make a noise.  So far with the HTC, I have not found how to do this.

Conclusion
The step forward is immense and I highly recommend anyone changing their phone considers using Android.

Footnote
I found the best deal at Phones4u using Compare Mobiles as £20.42 per month for 24 months, 300 mins, 300 texts for an HTC Desire Z (with slide out keyboard).

Record your expenses without those pesky paper receipts

Here is a practical alternative to keeping all those little receipts for your expenses/taxman.

1. Set yourself up an Evernote account (it's free).  More about Evenote in my earlier post here.
2. Add your Evernote email address to your mobile phone (to find the email address in Evernote look at: settings, account summary)
3. When you get a receipt, take its photo and email it from your phone to your Evernote account (test a few first - my first photos of small receipts were blurred because I had the camera too close to the paper).

Those are the 'must do' steps.  For extra security and ease of searching, I suggest the following extras:

1. In Evernote, set up a separate note book for your receipts and periodically drag your receipts there.  This will allow you to easily share your receipts with others (accountant/taxman) when you need to.
2. It's better to scan your receipts as soon as you can (not in big batches).  As well as reducing the chance of you losing them, it means that the dates will be more meaningful, which will help if you need to retrieve one later.

Notes for the future

The solution proposed above is the electronic version of putting the envelopes in a big envelope.

What would be even better would be a way of dynamically linking these scanned images to a cloud based accounting system, so that you could drill down from profit and loss account, to transaction list, to transaction, to scanned receipt.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but so far that is not available for personal/SME users.

Security

Many people distrust computers in case they lose the data.  If you have Evernote installed on your PC, you have a second life: you have a local copy on your machine as well as the copy in the cloud that you can get from any web connected computer (or phone), with your password.

Electronic notes (in the cloud)

I have long been keen on keeping notes electronically.  The main reasons for this are that it make it easier to search them and that it makes it easier to share them.  Working as an interim, you never know when you might need to be able to do (or get someone else to do) something you once did.  If you can email a note you prepared earlier it saves a lot of time.  Better still, if it is a frequently asked question, you can share it and start creating a knowledge base.

Until this week, my electronic notebook of choice has been Blogger.  I use a blog as a notebook and only share it if appropriate and then only to those who need to see it.  Often cutting and pasting part of a note is enough.  I am now taking a serious look at Evernote.

Evernote and Blogger are both simple to use (Evernote is simpler).  They have many similarities including one click tools to grab content from your web browser.  The table below highlights the differences:

Blogger Evernote Cost Completely free Free for upto 40MB upload each month - probably enough for most people and $5 a month above that for 500MB. Offline availability No. Yes.  A desktop version is available for PCs, Macs and most phones (not Nokias though). Levels of heirarchy 2: spearate blogs per subject then each post can have multiple 'labels' which can be easily filtered on. 2 and a bit: separate note books are equivalent to Blogger's blogs, multiple 'tags' are equivalent  to Blogger's labels.  Evernote does allow saving search criteria which could give a bit more flexibility. Display Designed as a blog so notes are vertical Designed for notes so can show thumbnails