Quick tour - How does 42Tags solve the paperless goal?
Let's demonstrate with the following case "John & Maria have signed a one-page contract with a financial fund".
We will first explain one of the basic ideas we employ - the 'tags'.
This is the definition of the word 'tag' taken from Wikipedia :
"A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (e.g. a picture, article, or video clip), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification of information for the purpose of retrieval."
So, in our example above:
This page may have the following tags - "John, Maria, Funds, Contract".
The order in which the tags are determined is not important.
Let's look at the main screen of 42Tags. It has Scan and Search tabs.
The image viewer occupies the majority of the screen.
Step 1 - Scan the page
There is a button on the tool bar above the image viewer for this (shortcut Control-S).
Step 2 - Give it a name
Change the Collection Name field (we will later explain this name) to the name of your scanned page. In our example, "contract with a financial fund".
Step 3 - Apply tags
In our case we will press four tag buttons - John, Maria, Funds, Contract.
On the left side you can see the Tag sections. They are comprised of several sections and each section contains several buttons. Each button represents a tag (the text on the button). The user can easily create tag buttons, and rename and manipulate sections.
Just press the tag buttons on the left to associate tags.
That's it! Isn't it simple?
Now let's make the example more complex to demonstrate more of 42Tags' great and simple features.
Example #2: What if our contract has several pages?
1) If you have ADF (Automatic Document Feeder) - enable it one (Tool->Scan->Settings) and just place all the papers on feeder, and that's it. Pressing Scan will scan them all.
2) If you don't have ADF, you can press the Scan button again for each page. In order to make your life easier we added a timed scan (Tools->Scan->Timed scan) so you just need to replace the pages and the scan will start automatically.
Example #3: You need to manipulate your scans
Rotate (including a direct 180 degree rotation), Delete page, Crop, and Reorder pages are all available from the upper tool bar.
You can even insert few pages from an external tif file in the middle.
Example #4: What if you have more tags?
Let's say you think it is important to add the name of the agent (Richard Rockwell) and the name of the city (Paris) as tags for the contract. It doesn't seem appropriate to add them as new tag buttons (because you will usually place the more frequently used tags as buttons).
The solution is to add the to the Tags text-box manually. Here you can add more tags (separated by commas). So, in this example - Richard Rockwell, Paris.
As you type, the Auto Completion feature will assist you.
Example #5: John also has a DOC file that is related to the contract.
John just needs to press the Attach button or drag and drop to add the file to the collection.
Here you can understand why we have called it a "Collection".
A "Collection" is a set of related files (scanned images and/or any other file types).
A Collection is similar to a Folder but it cannot contain other Collections.
Tagging is applied to a Collection so you can find all your files together.
The Collection concept is unique to 42Tags, which solves the folder problem and the individual file-tagging problem (it's hard to connect between items).
OK, now let's examine the Search part.
Six months later John wants to locate this contract.
There are many search options but we will now describe the most basic one.
John remembers that the contract has John and Funds tags, so he presses these tags on the Tags section, and then presses the Search button (or Enter key).
He will now get a list of all collections with some of their identifying details.
He can immediately view the relevant collection by clicking on it.
In another scenario John wants to search for a file beginning in "Fin". He just has to start typing
"Fin" in the Query text box and he instantly gets completions. Pressing Find will retrieve all collections containing that file.
We have demonstrated some of the basic features of 42Tags, and shown how it is the complete paperless solution for every one.
But there are many more features! If you want to learn more, just jump into the tutorial.
You are invited to try our fully featured application for 42 days - download here.