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Yep vs. Yojimbo vs. DevonTHINK for paperless PDF office

A

akm3

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Nov 15, 2007
2,252
279
My wife has tons and tons of paper binders that she uses for her business. I want to scan / pdf them all and make them paperless. I am leaning towards the SnapScan s510m as it has good reviews, a large capacity, is reasonably priced, and pretty fast (and Mac compatible!)

But, once I have these gadzillion PDF's, which organizer is the best suited for what she needs to do?

She needs to tag all these documents, and quickly be able to find the virtual 'binder' she is looking for. All three seem to do this, but I don't understand why one is better than the other.

Any sort of automated work flow with automater (Which I've never used but understand is quite powerful) that uses OCR or something to auto tag the documents and auto import them into Yep/Yojimbo/Devonthink would be great.

She has a Mac Book Air coming next week so I want to get this up and running for her ASAP.

Anyone doing something similar (moving to a 'paperless office') have any advice or experience to share?
 
Ack! No replies.

Has anyone used any of the three programs mentioned to try to move 'paperless' ? What experience did you have?
 
Of the ones you list, I only use DevonThink Pro Office and have adopted an almost paperless office. I don't use automator, nor do I do any tagging, instead favouring a folder structure and making folders that are reasonable intuitive about what they contain. I can highly recommend DevonThink PO.
 
There seem to be loads of these programs, including the ones you mentioned and others like Journler, circus ponies notebook, etc. I tested a bunch of them and found that all do most things well, but each does some things better than others.... so I think it becomes a matter of testing them (through trial periods) and comparing them for your needs. I know that requires some work but you may find that one does better for PDFs organization as you (your wife) needs it. I ended up with Yojimbo, there are some aspects of it that I don't love, but it seemed to meet my basic needs for collecting and organizing data including PDF, emails, webpages, notes, and the like...
 
I have the Scansnap, Devon Pro Office, an Yep. I find that I use Yep more then Devon. Devon does not support tagging, and for its searching system to perform at its best they recommend using a fairly structured file system. I'd rather just tag and dump so Yep works better for me.
 
I have been using Yep with a SnapScan for over a year and love it. Scan everything, shred everything.

I have over 2,500 pdfs in Yep and it works great.

Highly recommend both.

BZ
 
Files in this electronic file cabinet should be accessible now and 5 years from now, and beyond. Having used Macs since 1987 I can tell you there's nothing worse than older files that you can't open.

So I'm betting that PDF will be around longer than WriteNow's format and because of it's ubiquitousness I've decided that everything I would want to put in my file cabinet will be in PDF format.

Therefore Yep looks like it's in the "just right" category. Yep recognizes only PDF documents and finds them for you anywhere on your hard drive and gathers them into an iphoto-like interface.
 
radarbob said:
Files in this electronic file cabinet should be accessible now and 5 years from now, and beyond. Having used Macs since 1987 I can tell you there's nothing worse than older files that you can't open.

So I'm betting that PDF will be around longer than WriteNow's format and because of it's ubiquitousness I've decided that everything I would want to put in my file cabinet will be in PDF format.

Therefore Yep looks like it's in the "just right" category. Yep recognizes only PDF documents and finds them for you anywhere on your hard drive and gathers them into an iphoto-like interface.
Click to expand...

You're answering a thread that is 7 months old... I doubt anyone's listening.
 
I also have the s510m and I love it. As far as which application to use I recommend yojimbo. It has almost no learning curve and can take almost any file you throw at it. It is also easy to export files at a later date in case you want to move to a different application or for whatever reason. One draw back for some is that it does not use the "folder" system. You tag items or just do a keyword search. Another draw back is no online access options which is why I have taken to using evernote in conjunction with yojimbo
 
I scan using my printer's software (Canon PIXMA MP620), then Print to PDF. I guess it'd be worth writing some AppleScript to process a large batch to PDFs at once
 
ggjstudios said:
You're answering a thread that is 7 months old... I doubt anyone's listening.
Click to expand...

I'm still listening!

The scansnap 510m will be a Christmas gift to myself, but I STILL haven't decided what software to use with it. I already have a Yep license, but I don't want to get too far down a path and then decide I have the wrong software.
 
I use the S510M with Yep and I love it. Yep does exactly what your looking for. The S510M comes with OCR software that you can setup to process a file automatically right after you scan it making everything you scan searchable. Have the scan software dump the pdf file into the Yep pending folder where you can add tags/keywords and then put the file into the folder of your choice. Very nice setup.


Jason
 
I use the SnapScan with Devonthink Pro Office, and I love it dearly. I tend to prefer folder structures over tagging, so it works perfectly for me. It also has built-in OCR (I'm not sure if any of the others do or not) and complete integration with the SnapScan.

The Devonthink 2.0 beta was released a few days ago, with a number of new features (including tagging!). If you tried the old version and found it lacking, I highly recommend you give the new version a shot.
 
dws90 said:
I use the SnapScan with Devonthink Pro Office, and I love it dearly. I tend to prefer folder structures over tagging, so it works perfectly for me. It also has built-in OCR (I'm not sure if any of the others do or not) and complete integration with the SnapScan.

The Devonthink 2.0 beta was released a few days ago, with a number of new features (including tagging!). If you tried the old version and found it lacking, I highly recommend you give the new version a shot.
Click to expand...

This is the direction I finally went, Devonthink Pro Office + ScanSnap S510M. I'm very, very happy with how they perform, speed, accuracy and reliability wise together. Finding documents is very, very quick. Filing them in a folder structure works well for me. It is great!
 
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