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My Fujitsu ScanSnap, my best friend

By: Stephanie Luke

“What is that noise?”

“Is there a semi truck outside?”

Those are the questions I would get when I used my old printer/scanner. The inexplicable, obnoxiously loud “hum” that would emanate from my, shall remain nameless, printer/scanner proliferated to every inch of our office. Not only was the thing loud, but it took FOREVER! And don’t even get me started on having to flip over and rescan double-sided pages.

[ Enter my illustrious Fujitsu ScanSnap ]

With my new best friend, I can fly through stacks of documents with ease.

There are too many useful features on this machine for me to name my favorite. I am the kind of person who ignores the instruction manual and never uses half of the features on new electronic devices.

My husband and I received a new digital camera as a Christmas gift last year, which boasts about 15 different capture settings and I’ve probably used two of them. A techie guru I am not.

However, I will give you a quick rundown of the features that I love the most.

Auto-detect settings

Black & white or full color, one-sided or two, business card or legal document? It doesn’t matter with the ScanSnap. Feed your documents into the machine and it scans color as color, black & white as black & white and will even scan both sides at once if it detects a two-sided page within the document.

You also have the ability to scan color documents as black & white, or scan only one side of a two-sided document, which I most recently used to scan a 10-page invoice that had the disclaimer mumbo jumbo on the back of every page. Who reads that stuff anyways?

The guides on ScanSnap easily adjust to hold anything from a business card to an 8.5 inch wide sheet of paper.  A document carrier was provided for documents of a strange size and/or shape, but I haven’t found the need to use it yet.

Small desktop footprint

While I have quite a bit of space on my desk, I love love love that the ScanSnap only takes up an area of 5x11 inches when it’s sleeping. When the cover and tray are unfolded during use it still only adds another 5 inches to the front and you can operate the scanner without having the tray open.

Easy to Operate

Flip the cover of the ScanSnap open and it automatically turns on, adjust the paper guides if needed, push the big green “Scan” button and Voila! the ScanSnap Organizer pops up on your screen with a thumbnail preview of your document. The Organizer also displays the other documents that you have previously scanned until you choose to delete them. This is especially helpful when combining pages from multiple documents.

Jammed documents are very easily removed, which I may or may not have done several times. One button releases the front cover and the document pops right out.

Hey … when a scanner feeds a torn open envelope through with no problems, I tend to assume that it's invincible and will feed anything.

Cross-functionality with Other Programs

The ScanSnap boasts “One Touch” PDF creation. Every document that is scanned is automatically turned into a PDF document (unless you otherwise choose a JPEG file format in the settings). The Organizer also gives you the option to Scan to E-mail, Scan to Print, Scan to Word, Scan to Excel or Scan to PowerPoint with simply a double-click on an icon.

I have used the Scan to Word feature once before, and while it was very helpful to avoid retyping an entire document, I still had to do some proofreading to make sure that it transmitted properly. Since I have not used the Scan to Excel feature before, I decided to do a test for this blog post. I printed a hard copy to scan.  After scanning the page I double-clicked the "Scan to Excel" icon in the Organizer. Within seconds an Excel document opened on my screen.

As you can see, it is exactly what was scanned, with one exception, the "1/2" scanned incorrectly. (Please also note that I had my tech guru colleague Keith take the photo for me. I’m not Man Hands from Seinfeld!)

Because of the Scan to E-mail feature, I have become the "Scanner Lady". Every-so-often someone will need to have a document scanned and sent to someone. Rather than using the slow fax machine or another scanner in the office, they ask the "Scanner Lady" and have the email in their inbox by the time they can get back to their desk.

In the end, nothing is perfect and I do have one minor complaint about my ScanSnap. Due to the fact that the scanner runs on auto-feed and not a platen glass, there is a size limit of 8.5x14.5 inches. I scan documents in a wide array of sizes and they don’t always fit. However, this is few and far between for me. The size issue is merely a gnat in my giant ice cream sundae – I can work around it.