I just threw out several piles of letters, printouts, statements and bills. They’re now safe and searchable in the part of the cloud that is managed by Evernote

This means I can search, print and send them, from anywhere, from my Mac, my iPhone, or any computer with an internet connection.

It also means I got rid of the piles.

The printer

The “HP OfficeJet J4680 All-in-One Wireless Printer” is just 800 Danish Kroner (107 EUR or 160 USD, probably less in the US). It has fax (you know you want it), a brilliant inkjet printer and a scanner.

Scan to Evernote

When an organisation is old skool enough to send me something on paper, I remove the envelope, insert it into the printer depicted above, choose “Scan”, “Morten’s Mac Mini” (which is also serving as a media center, but that’s another story), then choose “Evernote”. It then eats the paper and adds it to my Evernote account. I didn’t touch a keyboard (unless I want to add tags or other meta data later on).

You can of course use your Macbook

The good

It’s easy and simple once set up. The device uses my wi-fi network, so I can hide it in a 220V equipped closet. It’s also a color printer. The feeder lets me scan multiple sheets in one go.

The bad

It can’t scan both sides at once. The feeder sometimes messes up. Evernote leaves the note open once added.

When adding a PDF, Evernote creates a new note for every page. I’m expecting Evernote to fix this bug anytime soon, and until then, I’m fine with just deleting the extra notes.

What you’ll need

a) An “HP OfficeJet J4680 All-in-One Wireless Printer”, but I guess most OfficeJets with scanners will come with the same software.

b) An Evernote account. You can make do with the free account, but if you want to search PDFs and get almost unlimited uploads, consider going premium .

c) A wireless network

d) A Mac, maybe your media server, but your laptop works, too. I read somewhere that this doesn’t work on Windows. If it does let me know.

How to set it up

1. Install the software and get the device up and running 2. launch the “HP Scan destinations” app3. untick any items you know you don’t want to skip through on your device4. Click the ‘+’ icon. Choose “Picture editing application”

6. The first entry we’ll create is for when you have a stack of individual sheets you want to add to Evernote in one go. Use the name “Evernote – Single sheets”, pick Evernote app from the Applications folder, and choose JPEG as your file type. Click Finish to save the item.

7. Add another for when you have a multi-page document you want to add to a single Evernote note. Name: Evernote – multiple sheets, Evernote.app, and choose PDF as the file type. Click Finish to save.
8. Drag your evernote items to the top of the list so they’ll appear as the first choices in your printer’s menu.

9. Click the Settings tab and choose the “Front panel”. This will change the settings for when you initiate scans from the printer. Choose Black and White, and a resolution of 200 for a setting that is sufficient for Evernote’s OCR to kick in, and still maintain a file size well below the 25 Mb maximum per note.

10. Close the dialog window.

That’s it. You’re ready to scan directly to Evernote.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 12:41 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.