Month: January 2013

New Year’s Resolution (part 3): Email as an alternative cloud storage solution

Our last post gave an overview of several cloud storage solutions for your PDF files. While we generally like all of these services, many users may also find it useful to just use an existing web-based email service (like Gmail, Yahoo, or Microsoft’s new Outlook.com) to archive and preserve copies of their PDF files.  This is also a viable alternative if your company or organization has a firewall or policy restriction when using the other services; this method just uses email to send PDF files.

Let’s take a look at a simple procedure at how a user with Win2PDF and a basic Gmail account can make a backup PDF file every time to print out a paper copy of a file. [Note: we like Gmail because it indexes PDF files for search.  You can search your Gmail account for any text that resides within the PDF file. In addition, you can automatically label the incoming emails to archive them without filling up your regular inbox. Other web mail accounts will do similar things, but our example uses Gmail for these reasons.]

For this example, make sure you have Win2PDF installed on your computer and have a active Gmail account. Then do the following:

1. Select your paper printer to be the default printer on your computer

2. Print to Win2PDF and select ‘Print file’ and ‘Send file’ (and ‘Delete after sending’ if you don’t want to keep a local copy of the PDF on your PC)

Send and Print file options with Win2PDF
Send and Print file options with win2PDF

The ‘Send file’ option uses the default e-mail client, or the free Win2PDF Mail Helper application (download Win2PDF Mail Helper).

3. A copy of the print will be sent to the default paper printer that you set up in step 1, but you will also create a PDF file that you can email to a Gmail account.

4. In Gmail, create a filter that matches your typical email and way of storing files. For example:

– From “[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>”

– Subject has the words “pdf” and “invoice”

– check “has attachment”

gmail_filter_sm
Use search criteria to filter emails

and then after filtering, you can

– apply a tag (e.g. “Invoices”)

– mark as read

– skip the inbox

Create filter with Gmail
Create filter with Gmail

And that’s it… This will automatically create a backup of your printed paper documents off-site in your Gmail account. And they won’t clutter up your inbox — they’ll just be archived in with a label that you can reference in the future. And you will be able to use Google’s search features to find these documents in the future — and Gmail allows you to search for text within the PDF files.

Next week we’ll conclude this series by looking at how the different services and methods compare for PDF users…  Stay tuned…

New Year’s Resolution (part 2): Organize and Store your PDFs in the Cloud

Last week we discussed going paperless by creating PDFs and storing them in the cloud, and today we’d like to continue that theme by looking at some of these services in general, and how the process can be automated.

The good news is that there are MANY cloud storage services that you can use to accomplish this type of cloud storage with various levels of free starter accounts.  You just set up an account with the particular service that’s best for you, designate a folder to ‘sync’ on your PC, and then just copy or save PDF files to this folder.  Here are some of the major services we’ve tried:

How do you use these services to back up PDF files?  Easy.  Once you’ve selected and installed your cloud storage service, just use Win2PDF to save your files to your PC’s designated Sync directory.

Cloud Storage Folders in Explorer
Cloud Storage Sync Folders in Explorer

And if you want to automate this even further with Win2PDF, our latest Win2PDF 7.5 release has an automatic naming/saving feature.  If you enable this feature, you can automatically have all of your files saved to the folder without any prompting.

So, which service is best?  It really depends.  Each service has a free option with a starter amount of storage.  We’ll be reviewing these services in the next couple of weeks and post our findings here to help you determine which one may be best for you.

New Year’s Resolution: Exercise, Eat Right, and Go Paperless

The start of a New Year and it’s time for everybody’s resolutions — which, if you’re like me, won’t last until February.  Going to the gym more?  Cutting out that morning muffin or extra cup of coffee each day?  It sounds good now but only time will tell if you can sustain it over the long term.

How about your work?  Have you thought about changing your printing habits, or how you can reduce your ‘paper footprint’?  Google has, and along with other companies, they’re encouraging online users to Go Paperless in 2013.

The idea is simple enough and PDF users probably “get it” more than most.  And with today’s technology it’s never been simpler to create, organize, and store your electronic documents in the cloud without having to resort to paper printing.  Retrieve the information you need, when you need it, on your computer, smartphone, or tablet.

It’s not only more convenient, but it’s also friendlier for the environment.  For example, a while back the World Wildlife Federation introduced a new .WWF file format for paperless files.  This WWF format is basically a PDF that cannot be printed out. It’s a great idea, but the WWF file is also encrypted so you cannot go back and edit the file or print it out at a later date.  If you just use PDF, you’ll be accomplishing this same thing and still give yourself a little more flexibility in the future.

You might want to consider Taking the Pledge to Go Paperless in 2013.  Throughout the year the Paperless Coalition will be promoting Paperless 2013 via an email newsletter.

In future PDFBlog.com articles we’ll also be exploring some cloud storage services that can help you keep this resolution, especially for users of PDF files.

Now, time to get that muffin…