Archive for the ‘Product Features’ Category

Emailing Documents Online

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

Last month we blogged about how easily you can email documents into OfficeDrop’s online storage service. Tucked at the end of that post was one of the most useful parts of our email-to-online feature: the ability to email your documents into a specific folder by using your email’s subject line. We use this feature here at OfficeDrop with our accounting documents.

email-document-onlineHere is how it works. Say you have an email (it can even have an attachment) that you want to get into the “Expenses” subfolder. Since it is a folder below the “Finance” folder, you need to add the following to the end of the subject line of the email when you forward it into your OfficeDrop account:

#folder: finance/expenses

It’s that easy! Start emailing into your OfficeDrop account today.

Annotating Digital Files

Monday, October 25th, 2010

Another tip for users of OfficeDrop’s online digital filing system – you can add annotations to the digital files stored in the OfficeDrop system. Here is how you add the annotations:

Digital File Annotations

Click on the document that you want to annotate. When in the document view, select ‘Annotate’ from the menu on the right. Draw the box where you’d like to make a note or add a thought, then type. You can edit and delete your annotations at any time. And they will be maintained after you log out.

Annotated Digital File

Annotated Digital File

Marking a Document as a Favorite

Friday, October 22nd, 2010

OfficeDrop now allows you to mark a document as a “favorite.” This makes it even easier to find the documents you use everyday in our online filing system.

You can add a document to your Favorites by selected ‘Favorite’ from the More drop-down menu in the snippet view. To access your Favorites, check the box to the right of the Favorites label in the Labels menu box under the home screen. Finding the document you need has never been easier!

Marking a document favorite example

Marking favorite document

Marking favorite document

OfficeDrop Text Search

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

One of OfficeDrop’s  best features is the ability to do a full text search of your scanned paper and your digital files. Since OfficeDrop uses OCR to make everything you put into the system text searchable, finding the file you need quickly is as easy as searching for information online.

Search Files with OfficeDrop

Searching files within OfficeDrop is easy, but there are a number of tricks you can use to narrow down your search results. The search box is located in the top right corner after you’ve logged into your account.

Text Search Example

Text Search Example

Narrowing Down Your Text Search Results

There are a number of tricks you can use to narrow down your search results. Here are some of the key text-search features:

Phrase search – Use quotation marks around a series of words to narrow down your search to words that appear in that specific order. So, if you put “invoice number” in quotes in the search box, the OfficeDrop search would first return results with those words next to each other.

Phrase Search

Phrase Search

Enter multiple words to narrow down relevancy: If you enter multiple words into the search box, OfficeDrop will search first for documents that contain all of these words.

Search within Folders and Labels: If you click into a folder and/or pick a label(s), when you search your results will be confined to the the folder/label(s) that you’ve selected. This is a way to narrow down the results. You need to 1st: use the search box, then 2nd: narrow down the results by picking the folder/labels. If you are first in the folder and then use the search box OfficeDrop will search ALL your files, not just those in the folder, so the order you use is important.

Folder Label Text Search

Folder Label Text Search

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Emailing Documents Into OfficeDrop

Monday, September 27th, 2010

You can email documents directly into your OfficeDrop account. The email bodies and attachments in any of the supported formats will be processed to your OfficeDrop account, just like the documents you mail in or upload.

How emailing into OfficeDrop works

Each OfficeDrop account gets its own unique email address, which is <your-username>@myofficedrop.com. So for example, if the username you use to login at OfficeDrop is johnorganizer, your OfficeDrop email address will be johnorganizer@myofficedrop.com.

Documents attached to this email, in addition to the email itself, will be uploaded into your OfficeDrop online digital filing system. You can share this email address with your coworkers, customers, partners, etc and they can send files into your account as well. However, you will have to provision the system to accept emails from these people – I’ll explain how in a moment.

Everything submitted into OfficeDrop via email becomes text searchable and can be labeled, put into folders, etc. There is a special string you can use in the subject line to automatically direct the email and its contents into a specific folder/label, which I will explain at the end of this email.

What happens when you email something into your OfficeDrop Account

We send an acknowledgment to both the sender and to you, that we have received an email to be processed. The email will then be processed to your account.

Both the email’s body and its attachments (in supported file formats) will be processed to your account. OfficeDrop currently supports over 25 file types, including: PDF, TIFF, JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TXT, HTML, DOC, XLS, and PPT. So these files will be uploaded into OfficeDrop

And to state the obvious, both the email body and the attachments will all be made searchable.

If a document fails processing, an email will be sent so that you can inform the sender.

Controlling spam and who can send emails into your OfficeDrop account

By default, only the email id that you provide while registering with OfficeDrop is enabled to send you email. So, if you provided johnorganizer@gmail.com while registering with OfficeDrop, you can already send emails from that email id.

You can modify the settings by clicking into the “tools” “upload via email” links in your account (click here and log in to visit this page.) Note that you can allow individuals to send you emails with their specific email address and/or can allow everyone from specific email domains to email you.

If you have multiple email accounts that you use then you should make sure you give those email addresses permission to email into your OfficeDrop account!

The following image also explains how to modify these settings:

Email to OfficeDrop

Email to OfficeDrop

How customers are using OfficeDrop’s email feature

It is hard to believe, but we introduced the email-into-OfficeDrop feature in 2008! Since then we’ve been amazed at how different customers have used this feature to get more out of their OfficeDrop account. Here are some of the many ways people are using this feature:

  • Automatically send online receipts into OfficeDrop while shopping online. All you have to do is to user your OfficeDrop email address. The same applies for online travel itineraries too.
  • Configuring e-faxes to go directly into OfficeDrop. If you get your faxes today via an e-fax service you can set the fax service to automatically send an email of each fax. Authorizing your OfficeDrop account to accept emails from your fax system is a smart way to access these faxes without having to print them.
  • Most multi-function printers, desktop and office scanners support the ability to “Scan to Email”. If you have a scanner, you can “Scan to email” any document and add it instantly to your OfficeDrop account. Document types supported by such scanners (TIFF, PDF, JPG) are all supported by OfficeDrop. Of course, we also recommend our ScanDrop Scanning Software to connect your scanner to the cloud…
  • Snapping photos with their cameras and sending the images to OfficeDrop. Take a picture of that receipt, or your favorite wine’s label and send it as an email attachment right from your phone.
  • Forwarding their own customers’ invoices, contracts, etc directly from their email into OfficeDrop. Why bother to download and then upload a file when you can get it directly into your account?
  • Using email to OfficeDrop to get files onto their iPad. Since OfficeDrop released the iPad application, many users have been sending attachments from email into OfficeDrop so that they can access and text-search the attachments on their iPad.

Sending emails directly into specific folders and adding labels

Your emails and their attachments can be sent into specific folders at the time you send the email. By adding a simple string into your email’s subject you can change where it goes. Add #Folder: customers/acme corp to the end of your email’s subject line to send it into the “acme corp” folder. To add a particular label, the syntax is the same: #Labels: label1,label2,label3 in the email subject.

Document Sharing

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

OfficeDrop let’s you publicly share and embed documents on your web pages. As Sunir at FreshBooks recently pointed out, sharing documents via your website is becoming a critical application for a lot of businesses who use the web to distribute marketing PDFs, case studies, owners manuals, etc. Here are a few examples of how you can publicly share documents via the web with OfficeDrop

Sharing a Folder of Documents

With OfficeDrop, you can embed a link to a folder of documents stored in the OfficeDrop system. Once shared, people clicking on the link will see this:

Share Folders of Documents Online

Share Folders of Documents Online

And the link your website visitors click on can pretty much look like anything! Here is our example: shared folder link example.

What to learn more about sharing documents via links with OfficeDrop? Read about publicly sharing documents and folders with OfficeDrop. Of course, you can also share individual files via links with OfficeDrop.

Publicly Share Document via Embed

Need to post a document on a website, and want to make it visible to everyone who visits your page? Paste a little OfficeDrop code on the web page and here is what you get:

Learn more about embedding PDFs on your website here.

OfficeDrop and Google Docs

Friday, September 10th, 2010

The entire team at OfficeDrop uses Google Docs everyday. We find the spreadsheets and documents are ideal for sharing important operational content across the firm. That is partially why we have put so much effort into our integrations with Google Docs. Here are a few of the great things you can do with OfficeDrop and Google Docs.

Scan to Google Docs

OfficeDrop’s ScanDrop software is the easiest way to scan directly into your Google Docs account. We connect TWAIN enabled scanners directly to your Google account for PC users. You don’t even have to open a browser to get your files online!

Connect OfficeDrop Digital Filing System to Google Docs

You can easily use OfficeDrop’s mail-in scanning service and online digital filing system to manage paper files in Google Docs. The best part about using OfficeDrop’s system with Google Docs is we make everything text searchable, so you can use Google Doc’s search bar and find information in your PDFs.

You can either automatically push contents in OfficeDrop to Google, or manually push individual files or folders of files.

You can learn more about OfficeDrop’s integrations on our Digital Office page.

Using Groups in OfficeDrop

Friday, August 27th, 2010

With OfficeDrop’s new multi-user accounts you now have powerful means to share data.

THE GROUPS FEATURE HAS BEEN RETIRED DUE TO LACK OF INTEREST FROM CUSTOMERS. YOU CAN NO LONGER SET AND MANAGE GROUPS WITHIN OFFICEDROP. If you are looking to set permissions for individual users you can do so within the Manage Users button in your Account area.

 

Scan to PDF

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

There are a lot of choices when it comes to digital document format, but our undisputed weapon of choice is the PDF.

OfficeDrop Scans Documents to PDF

The PDF is a universal format, requires no exclusive software to be read, and maintains a consistent layout on any platform. This makes it ideal for sharing because it will view the same way for both parties. Also, since the PDF is so popular,  it’s pretty unlikely that a recipient doesn’t already have a program for PDF viewing.

There are plenty of other reasons we think the PDF is an ideal format for digital filing. To learn more about the benefits of the PDF, see our scan to PDF page.

Scanning Directly to Google Docs

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Our link to Google Docs feature has been getting a lot of hype lately so we just wanted to remind you the two easy ways OfficeDrop lets you scan directly to Google Docs. Whether you want us to do it, or you want to do it yourself, OfficeDrop gets your paper out of those filing cabinets and into Google Docs.

Scan Directly to Google Docs (2 Ways)

1. Have Us Scan It

Hopefully you’ve heard that OfficeDrop provides mail-based scanning either in bulk, or with monthly scanvelope submission. When you have us scan, you have the option of automatic upload to our online digital filing system. Now that you can link your OfficeDrop account to Google Docs, you can configure your OfficeDrop account to automatically send every page we scan to your Google Docs account. Keep in mind that because you scanned with OfficeDrop, every document is converted to text-searchable PDF, ready to search on Google Docs.

2. Self Scan with ScanDrop

With our increasingly popular ScanDrop scanning software (free for download), you can turn your own personal scanner into a direct portal to Google Docs (*see below for compatible scanners). Configuring your scanner with ScanDrop allows you to view, edit, delete, reorder, and upload any scans right to Google Docs – all from the same intuitive application. You can even choose which Google Docs folder to upload to, and name your scans. However, keep in mind that documents sent directly to Google Docs through ScanDrop are not made text-searchable. See ScanDrop’s recent article on Life Hacker.

If you use Google Docs, then don’t miss out on these two simple and affordable ways to get all of your paper documents directly to Google Docs. Send to us or scan yourself and start putting your paper to work in Google Docs.

*Scanners ScanDrop is compatible with: (more…)

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