5 Top Apps to Help You Go Paperless

With the right app, you never have to save business cards, and you can capture whiteboard text and slides from presentations and transform them to readable, searchable documents in an instant.

If you have a smartphone, you need a scanning app with optical character recognition (OCR). Scanning apps help you capture all kinds of information in a split second, from whiteboard notes to important documents. A scanning app saved my behind recently after I picked up a new passport. I scanned a copy of it on the spot, but then I had to immediately turn it over to someone else to apply for a visa. Before my passport was returned to me—more than two weeks later—I had to fill out a bunch of paperwork that required details from my passport. Good thing I had a legible copy!

If you're still wondering why you would need a scanning app, and preferably one with OCR, here are a few scenarios that might convince you:

Business cards. The next time someone hands you a business card, use a scanning app to save that person's contact information in less than 30 seconds. Then celebrate being paperless by returning the business card (or recycling it later). Some apps automatically create a contact card or find the person on LinkedIn to make sure you two are fully connected.

Whiteboards and presentation slides. When you're in an important meeting, pay attention to the speaker, not every detail that's on the whiteboard or in the presentation. Just snap a picture of important slides as they appear, or scan the whiteboard as the meeting is coming to a close.

Important documents to email to others. Say your bank gives you an important document to sign, but you want your lawyer to check it over first, ASAP. You can scan the paper and email it to your lawyer right on the spot. Some scanning apps even have a tool that lets you sign them digitally, too.

Important documents to back up. Take my passport example from above and swap in any number of important documents that you can't physically keep for one reason or another, but should. In many situations, being able to scan documents—even very lengthy ones—in a matter of seconds saves you a time, money, and hassle. Street signs. When a for-sale sign on a house catches your eye, a scanning app lets you grab a picture of the phone number, relator's name, and even the street number on the door or mailbox without having to write down anything at all. Or when you pass by a shop that's closed and see business hours written on the door, you can snap a picture and save all that text somewhere safe and searchable.

What to Look For in a Scanning AppThe best scanning and OCR apps have a few key features.

Save and export options. The best scanning apps give you options for where you can save or export your newly scanned texts. You don't want an app that forces you to keep documents in a new place. Look for options such as the ability to export to Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, and other popular cloud storage services.

Search functionality. When pictures of text are turned into words, those words need to be searchable for you to get the most out of them. The best scanning apps run OCR on text in images, which helps give you strong and reliable search functionality. Just as good are scanning apps that export to a service that has great OCR and search, such as Evernote.

Edge detection. A great OCR app automatically finds the edges of paper automatically, no matter if it's A-11, legal-size paper, or a standard-size business card.

Speed. Really good OCR scanning apps fly through documents faster that you can put them in front of your smartphone's camera. They also collate multiple pages into a single PDF document with ease.

Free. Don't get suckered into paying for an expensive scanning app. Many of the best ones are free. If there is an up-sell, it's typically an enticement to pay for a premium subscription to get extra features. In a few of the very best scanning apps, the OCR functionality isn't included for free, but the cost to upgrade is nominal.

Recommended Scanning AppsNow that you understand what scanning apps can do and why you might want one, here are a few that I recommend, with notes on their strengths and limitations.

 

ABBYY FineScanner Free; $4.99 per month fee for Premium features, including OCRABBYY FineReader is the best OCR software for your computer, so it's no surprise that the company's mobile app, called FineScanner, is of equally high quality. The FineScanner app can export PDFs and Word docs of your scanned images to Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Google Drive, Yandex.Disk, iTunes, and iCloud Drive for iOS users. It can send files elsewhere, too, when you look for sharing options: email, Evernote, FaxBurner, and other compatible apps and services that you have installed on your phone. One neat feature is that you can take three quick pictures of the same document and let the app decide which one is of the best quality. You'll need to pay for a Premium account ($4.99 per month) to get OCR, but other perks include support for 44 languages and the option to password-protect PDFs you create using the app. Though this app is for iOS only, the company also makes a business card reader app for Android, iOS, a nd Windows Phone.

Available on iOS

Evernote, and Evernote Scannable Free; $49.99 per year for Premium, including increased upload allowanceEvernote is my first choice in scanning and OCR apps. The namesake Evernote app lets you scan business cards, documents, and any written, typed, or hand-written text into the app, where it runs OCR on the results and makes it all searchable. The OCR is included free. Business cards scanned into Evernote are transferred into a contact card, and you can opt to connect to LinkedIn for even more details. A companion app, called Evernote Scannable (for iOS only), makes quick work of scanning stacks of business cards or multipage documents, which you can save directly into Evernote or another supported service. A Premium account for $49.99 per year increases your upload allowance, which is crucial if you create a lot of large PDFs by scanning. Great edge-detection, excellent export options, and OCR included free all make Evernote and Evernote Scannable wonderful apps to help you stay organized.

Available on Android, i OS, and Windows PhoneEvernote Scannable for iOS only

Google Drive FreeWhen you upload pictures that contain text to the Google Drive mobile app, they are scanned and run through OCR to become fully searchable. Note that this functionality does not show up in the separate Google Docs and Sheets apps. The sloppy image shown here of a recipe for chocolate soda turned up when I search for "cocoa." Google didn't even get stumped by the poor lighting or awkward shadows. How great is that?

Available on: Android and iOS

Microsoft Office Lens FreeMicrosoft this year came out with Microsoft Office Lens, its take on a mobile scanning app. Because Office Lens is from Microsoft, it works very well with OneNote, OneDrive, Word, and other Microsoft apps. It's not as zippy as Evernote Scannable, and it doesn't offer as many places where you can export files as Scanbot (see below), but it does have a Whiteboard setting, which few other scanning and OCR apps have. The Whiteboard mode cleans up photos of whiteboards by straightening and cropping appropriately, and applies a high-contrast filter to the image, making it more legible. Unfortunately, OCR isn't supported for hand-written text on whiteboards as of this writing.

Available on Android, iOS, and Windows Phone

Scanbot Free; $4.99 one-time fee for Pro features, including OCRScanbot is another scanning and OCR app, though to get OCR, you have to upgrade to Pro by paying a $4.99 one-time fee for a lifetime membership. That's not a bad price at all, and throw in another great Pro feature—the ability to edit documents, including adding a signature—and now we're talking big benefits. Scanbot can save your scanned documents to Dropbox, Google Drive, Wunderlist, Slack, Evernote, OneDrive, Box, Yandex.Disk, WebDAV, Telekom Cloud, and Shoeboxed. On iOS, it can also sync to iCloud Drive.

Available on Android, Android for Amazon devices, and iOS

Beyond Mobile AppsFor more tips on getting organized, see

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, based in Washington, D.C., specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as apps and gadgets for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital formats. She also spoke at TED@250, a salon-style conference at TED.com headquarters, about how to better and more sanely manage email. Before joining PCMag.com,... More »

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Source: 5 Top Apps to Help You Go Paperless