5 Tools to Help Organize Your Digital Documents

More digital products, information, and data mean more necessary storage space. Prior to the boom of the information age, individuals and businesses used filing cabinets and scanners to store important documents. But as data continues to grow, people need more areas to not only store information, but to organize it.

Therefore, as communication continues to grow throughout digital platforms, so will storage and organizational digital applications. Below are 5 application tools that will help streamline your efforts in organization and storage. If you don’t have even one of these 5 applications, I would recommend downloading some of them quickly to your phone, tablet, or other device – most of them are free.

So here they are, the 5 application tools you should have right now to help organize your digital documents.

The Top Five Apps

Dropbox – One of the first applications to the market of cloud-based data storage, this application is a great addition to your collection that can be used for business or personal endeavors. The basic subscription to the server is free and provides you with up to 2GB of free storage space. In addition, one of the most magnifying aspects of this application is the ability to access more space for storage through referrals, surveys, and games. By participating in various activities provided by the company, you may be able to gain up to an additional 16GB in free space. Additional space is only approximately $10.00 a month for about 100GB. The application allows you to organize videos, images, or documents through folders and digital filing cabinets, where multiple people are able to work on the project and share the account.

Google Drive – Google Drive does about the same thing as Dropbox, but provides much more functionality than Dropbox in both sharing and simultaneous working. In addition, all workers on the project will have Gmail applications including email, docs, presentations, storage, etc. All of these applications allow multiple people shared on a specific folder to access to all of these applications within Google’s infrastructure. Everything used within the Google network is free, unless you’re interested in higher-end upgrades that are not extremely necessary to get the job done.

Box – Many people confuse this storage and organizational tool with Dropbox, but Box is actually a predecessor to the well-known cloud-based storage system – and many agree that it’s better. Dropbox suffices the needs of individuals for personal storage, particularly smaller documents and videos across multiple platforms. On the contrary, Box was designed for enterprises because the functionality surpasses Dropbox on every level. Box is best known for collaborative work due to the privacy and confidentiality controls. For example, managers can easily delegate tasks by choosing which employees can edit, upload, or open certain files. Even if you don’t use Box for business, the control functions involved with the storage application are great. The downfall is the lack of upload sizes and total space available per account – this application also costs money for membership.

Things – This time management system and task manager helper allows you to organize digital documents and task lists, while also organizing your goals by breaking down achievable chunks of each task and assigning schedules for completion. If you’re looking to get organized on all levels and get things done efficiently, this is the optimal solution for you. It does cost a little money, ranging from $10.00 to $50.00 based on platform. If you’re looking for free alternatives, I would recommend Todoist.

ABBYY Business Card Reader – Free version on Android and $4.99 on iOS for full version. Let’s face it; everyone accumulates business cards or contact cards over time from colleagues and other individuals interested in continuous contact. This application is well worth the small cost, effectively converting your taken picture of the given card to storable text in your phone. After the scanner has captured the information on the card, you’ll be able to edit any errors or change information at will on your phone’s contact editor. ABBYY is a very effective technology, relatively accurate, and one of the premiere optical character recognition software apps on the planet.


Author Bio:
Matthew Hall is a recent graduate from Florida Institute of Technology who presently supplements his income with freelance writing on tech matters. For getting those digital documents to others, he highly recommends making use of an online fax service which can be found through comparison services such as Find A Fax.