Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I’m slightly overcome a little bit.
I’ve got a technology crush happening right now.
Our friends at Evernote have hit one homerun in the past as far as I’m concerned.
The Evernote Web Clipper is a tool which I think is one of the best tools ever created.
It has changed my life.
They might have done it again.
I’ve probably used 735 different scanning ups on my smartphone, different apps that
capture documents.
Well, Evernote has released Scannable and yeah, I’ve got a tech crush going on.
It is blowing me away.
Why?
Stick around and I’ll show you today on DottoTech.
Now I’m not one to gush all that often about a piece of technology.
I expect them to perform really well but when something is released, especially in a space
that you’ve used a lot in the past and they delight you because they really have looked
at what’s going on in the marketplace and figured it out, that is worth celebrating
and is worth getting a little bit excited about.
Evernote might have done that with Scannable.
It’s still early.
I’ve only been using it for a couple of days.
It’s been around for a little over a week I think but I was waiting for my brand new
iPhone 6+, the huge one.
Look at the size of that thing!
It’s bigger than my head.
I was waiting for it to arrive before I started to play with it because my old 4S just wasn’t
up to the task.
Unfortunately once again for our android cousins, this product released out of the gate is only
for iOS, the iPad and the iPhone.
Sorry, guys.
But it’s going to be worth waiting for just like other tools that Evernote has released.
It’s certainly going to be great when it comes on in the android as well.
So what is it?
It’s basically a scanning app that allows you to capture documents really quickly and
easily.
As I’ve said before, I’ve used dozens of these different apps in the past but Scannable,
oh my gosh, watch how quickly it just kind of gets it.
It’s a single purpose.
It’s designed to capture scans of documents, business cards and receipts.
You name it, it will capture.
So what I’m going to do is I’m going to launch it here and I’m going to show you
quickly how awesome it is.
There’s my Evernote notebook.
Do you see what it’s doing?
It parsed out where the information was, captured it and has stored it for me already.
Just that quickly it found the information.
Now I’m looking here on my screen.
Your screen looks a little bit blurry.
I think it’s because I’m using a wireless connection here.
My screen looks fantastic.
So it’s completely readable, ready to work with in Evernote and you’ll see once I’ve
saved it on Evernote.
That was just a note captured from one of my Evernote notebooks but this could have
easily been a document, a contract, pretty much any document that you want to capture.
Now what do you want to do with a document once you’ve captured it?
Well, they give us a variety of different options.
First of all if you look at the three little dots down at the bottom, we can crop it, rotate
it or delete it.
So you’ve got the ability to be able to modify the document if you need to after you’ve
captured it.
By the way, did you notice how quickly it captured?
It doesn’t always work as well and automatically define the parameters of the document.
I found depending on the background, most of the time it works that well but the odd
time it hasn’t automatically parsed it out that way or figured it out just as an aside.
But once you’ve got it, you can go in and you can edit the name of the document.
I’m going to call this my Demo Doc so that we can see it once I’ve saved it into Evernote.
I’m going to save it as Demo Doc.
There we go.
Now if I click on the little sharing tool below, it then first of all saves the document
to Evernote for me automatically because that’s how I’ve set up my preferences.
I’ll show you the Preferences in a moment but now look at all the different options
I have because when you scan in a document, sometimes you want to save it yourself to
Evernote but sometimes it’s just a permission form that you have to send off to the school
or sometimes it’s just a receipt that you have to send to somebody.
So while you want in Evernote yourself or you probably want it in Evernote, often you’re
going to want to do something like mail it to somebody so you just tap on the mail icon
and it brings the document up and saves it.
Now single-page documents, it automatically creates as JPEGs.
It’s going to save it as JPEG.
If you scan in a multi-page document, it will save it as a PDF.
Those are presets in the software.
You can’t change that but this is going to send it as a JPEG I believe to whoever
it is that we’re sending it to.
You can also instantly message it by using a message tool.
Obviously, if you haven’t got it to save it to Evernote right away, you can save it
to Evernote.
You can save it to your cameral roll or you can export it to whatever services that you
happen to have set up.
Now I haven’t set up very many services on this phone yet but if I’d set up my Dropbox
account or my Google drive, I would have had access to those in the Export mode.
This is only my second day with the phone.
I’m just starting to set it up.
If we go into the More area, that brings up the iOS 8 sharing aspects where now we can
be posting this to Twitter or Facebook.
We can be doing a variety of different things with this document as we’ve got it.
But now what we’ve saved it, let’s just jump over and let’s take a look at Evernote
itself so that we can see where it’s come in.
I’m just going to go into my notebooks here.
I’m going to go into my Inbox and hopefully we’re going to see that right here in the
Inbox, the scan that we just brought in.
Let’s sync it.
There’s the note, yup, indeed.
There’s the note that we just captured.
As you can see it’s nice and clear and over time Evernote will of course go through and
it will pull all of the text out of this which is just awesome.
So this is super clean for capturing documents but it does more than just capture documents.
Let me jump into it and let me show.
Actually, let’s do this first.
Let’s go over into the Settings.
I’m going to go back and I’m going to go into the Settings for the app.
So I just tapped on the gear icon to bring up the settings and we have the Evernote link
happening here.
You can have it automatically saved to Evernote.
You can choose which notebook you want to save things to in Evernote and you can change
this on the fly.
If you’re scanning in a bunch of receipts and you want to change the default notebook
from the Inbox to your accounting notebook, you could set this here.
But also if you scan down, it does two things that I think are quite interesting.
First, it will also link to your calendars.
I haven’t tested this out but what they say it will do is it will actually look at
who you have appointments with in your calendar and it will automatically create sharing of
documents that you scan in with other people in the calendar if you’ve got a meeting
booked and you’re taking pictures of the whiteboard, it will automatically share those
pictures or those images, those scans with the people in the meeting.
It’s kind of interesting.
It could be problematic but it’s an interesting option.
Far more interesting is the LinkedIn connection.
This is similar to what we’ve got built into Evernote where when you scan in a business
card, it’ll automatically connect it to LinkedIn.
Let me show you that.
I’m going to go back to Done.
Now I’ve pulled up a business card.
Look how quickly it finds the business card.
You can do this even if you’re holding it.
It then takes the business card, goes in and look, it has found Jordan already in LinkedIn
and is all set to connect me to Jordan, copy all of the information into my address book.
This is that LinkedIn connection between the address book and scanning in business cards
and it is on a different level and you see how it performed here.
It was just almost instantaneous.
There it’s created the link and it’s created the connection in LinkedIn with Jordan.
The other thing that I really like about this is using it for this purpose here.
I’m going to just pull up one other document and it’s a receipt.
I love using this for receipts.
It’s just looking for it.
Oh, it found too much of it.
Let me see if I can find it.
There it is.
It so quickly captures it, focuses it and then brings that document in where we can
now open it, save it to Evernote and give it a name.
Now it’s ready for whatever accounting purposes we need.
I think when you are like me where you travel a lot for a lot of speaking engagements, you
want to capture receipts rather than carrying them in a bulky wallet, this is just a terrific
way to proceed.
Evernote Scannable is free which is huge and it seems to be performing on a spectacular
level right out of the box.
They’ve figured out all of the little things that you want to do with a scanning app.
And I didn’t even talk about one additional feature because I can’t show it to you here.
It will control the Evernote Edition ScanSnap.
The Fujitsu ScanSnap, you can actually talk to with the app and multiple people in the
team can talk to the same scanner.
So you can have it scanning documents through the scanner, through a physical scanner directly
into your smartphone for connection to Evernote.
So you’ve got some really nice integration built in.
But as far as I’m concerned, right out of the gate, that ability to just be able to
focus on a document, to be able to not have to define it, poke and do all of the cropping
yourself but it looks for the parameters of the document, focuses on it, scans it and
snaps it automatically for you and then lets you make changes afterwards but it assumes
that it’s doing it correctly, just awesome, straight out of the gate awesome.
It had me at “Do you want to save this to Evernote?”
It’s just a great, simple, free app that might change the way that you capture documents.
When I moved over my smartphone from the iPhone 4S to this new iPhone 6+ just yesterday, this
is one of the first apps that I installed.
When I did that, I didn’t even bother installing any of the other five or six scanning apps
that I’ve purchased over the years because I don’t think I’m going to need them anymore.
I hope you found this video today to be useful.
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Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!