In the digital era, most documents that we use these days are in an electronic form. Using these documents bring us many benefits like easier sharing, storing and instant access from anywhere. But, there is also a set of new problems that come with using a digital document that may cause a headache to some of you.
There are many document management traps that negatively impact our productivity and cause irritation. Luckily, you can easily solve most of these problems with a few simple solutions. We have decided to point out the most common document management issues and help you to avoid them.
Can’t find the file you need
If you work with numerous documents every day, you ought to have some system for sorting them out. Spending too much finding the right document can lower your productivity and leave you feeling annoyed. To avoid this from happening, you should use a document management system. You don’t need to look for expensive one when Google Drive is a good solution that is free. Google Drive is useful as both cloud storage and document creation system.
When you have a dozen documents stored there, you can easily search their titles or content in them by typing search terms. That way you won’t lose time searching for them manually. If you have multiple versions of the same document, you can see the one that you or your colleagues have accessed or changed most recently. Little things like this can save you a lot of time when practiced daily.
Trying to edit scanned PDF document
The biggest document management trap is when you try to edit a scanned PDF file. The text in the scanned file is non-editable, so copy-paste can’t work there either. People usually turn then to some PDF converter tools which can help them. Although, not every PDF tool can help you with this. You will need to find one that has OCR technology integrated into their functioning. If you search for such a tool, you can use this online PDF converter that can be used for free and without registration.
Next time you find your coworker sending you a scanned PDF for editing, you know now what to do. Use OCR conversion to extract text from scanned PDF to some editable document. This advice can also be useful when you want to reuse an existing PDF document. Instead of retyping the file from scratch, use mentioned tools to convert PDF into an editable Word document.
Sending documents in Word (docx) format
You have spent the last few hours typing your research project. You have finally finished and want to send it for publishing. But, you send your file in a Word format because you wrote it there. Well, you might have spent that time formatting the text for nothing because on another PC it looks all jumbled up. As a job seeker, sending resume as Word document is the easiest way to get your job application skipped.
To avoid this well-known document management trap always save your documents as PDF. In that way, you will be sure that other person will see the file as you intended. There are two ways how can you save a text file in PDF. In MS Word, once you want to save file, use “save as“option and choose PDF as the desired format. Another solution is to use online tool and convert Word to PDF. Before sending an official document, always check if you have saved it as PDF first.
With the knowledge of most common document management traps, you can now easily avoid them. You can use these tips to your advantage whether you need to edit scanned PDF, save Word file as PDF or create a searchable document database. Hopefully, this will be useful to some of you that experienced these problems in the past.