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How to Prepare Your Documents for Scanning

Document Scanning

Most people don't give this a lot of thought until they're faced with a mountain of documents that need scanning. It can take days, even weeks, to get documents scanned – depending on the type of scanner you have and how well you've prepared your documents to be scanned. Here's a list of steps that you can use to make scanning easier and quicker – just by properly preparing your documents before turning on the scanner, or handing them over to a scanning service:

  1. Go through every document and remove staples, paper clips, tape, or any other material that binds sheets together. Your goal is to ascertain that all pages are separate before you begin scanning.
  2. The only time tape should be used is when you have items such as plane tickets, receipts, business cards, and other such items that need to be scanned. If you do, tape them evenly and straight in the middle of a sheet of paper. Also, only tape these items on one side of a sheet of paper – never both sides. It's too easy to forget to scan both sides, and the paper will be awkward and heavy with items on each side of it.
  3. Any folds in the pages need to be straightened out. The reason for this is obvious – any of the information in the folded section will not be scanned, so ascertaining that all parts of each page is visible is critical. Be sure to also straighten out bent corners as much as possible.
  4. Arrange all the material to be scanned in the order you want them to be scanned in. This will make the process of scanning quicker if you're not trying to do it at the same time. Also, if someone else is going to be scanning, it will ascertain the job is done the way you want it done.
  5. Some scanners allow multiple pages to be fed into the machine at once, while others will only accept one page at a time. Determine the scanner's limits and then go through your stack of documents waiting to be scanned. Make batches that match the scanner's limits ahead of time, keeping all of them in the proper order.

While the above steps are mostly common sense, having them in front of you will make the process quicker and easier. Whoever is doing the scanning will appreciate the time you took in preparing your documents.

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