Kendall Giles

When I got lost one day in my labyrinth of stacked journal articles, receipts, photographs, and other paper detritus, I knew I needed help.

While Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek (review), might suggest outsourcing the scanning all my documents into digital format for storage, in order to eliminate the paper yet retain the useful information, I first decided to go the manual route. This meant finding a good, easy-to-use, fast, document scanner that works on my Mac, and I think I found just that in the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner.

With a footprint smaller than an 8.5x11" sheet of paper, the ScanSnap is really cutting through my stacks of documents. It handles multiple pages and makes fast, two-sided, color pdfs of the documents with just one button push. It also easily scans in photographs, business cards, envelopes, etc. The software gives you a choice of saving the pdf to a folder, emailing it, printing it, importing into iPhoto, part of iLife '09, or creating a searchable pdf. The latter makes the contents of your pdf document searchable by your OS or other search/filter applications, for instant retrieval of information buried in a large document repository.

"One touch" pdf creation, indeed.