"The Paperless Office"

By Leah Lothringer
PDF Store Support Team
Issue 18 for 2006

With the appearance of the personal computer in the 1980s came the term, 'the paperless office.' It was predicted that with the proliferation of the PC, information would be stored and transferred electronically, eliminating the need for paper. Interestingly, this vision is yet to be realised – what office is devoid of a printer and/or photocopying machine? However, in the last couple of years, many software companies (including Adobe) have revisited the concept, with recent advances in digital databases and more powerful communication channels. Over at Planet PDF, Jinsoo Kim of Image Solutions discusses the paperless office concept and the role of PDF.

There are considerable benefits that come with moving towards a paperless office. Most visibly are cost reductions associated with less printing, mailing and archiving. Rather than leafing through filing cabinets or piles of invoices, information can be retrieved via a simple search function. An organization’s entire store of data can be distributed to employees via a network.

There are several key technologies that must be considered if an organization intends to consolidate its collection of paper documents into an electronic archive. Existing pages should be scanned to PDF using a PDF creation product, such as Nitro PDF Professional. For archiving and retrieval purposes, scanned text should be subject to OCR (Optical Character Recognition). This will convert what is a scanned image of a document into searchable text. An OCR Tutorial for Acrobat 6 can be found at Planet PDF (the Paper Capture function is also found in Acrobat 7).

Look out for the next issue of PDF Perspectives, where I will be discussing further paperless office technology and some associated tools that utilise PDF. Until then, the Create/Convert aisle at PDF Store is a good resource of PDF creation and management products.