Last year, I’ve gone completely paperless. Most of my archives were already digital, but when I discovered Evernote, I went the extra mile and moved everything I had into one giant archive in the online cloud.

Now that I have almost 25.000 documents and notes in one place, it has become easier to retrieve old information. And since I have access to it everywhere, I can send it without delay to anyone who needs a certain document.

And yes, from time to time I rant that Evernote has become sluggish on my pc, but aw shucks, all in all, I’m still a fan.

Now, there are many books and articles and blogposts with tips and tricks to use Evernote, and I have read most of them. I have learned many useful tips. But one trick I found myself, and have not read it anywhere. So with this post, I will add an extra nugget of (at least to my estimation) useful info to the online knowledge base.

Scan documents and add automatically to Evernote, with your everyday scanner.

Several articles give tips on how to easily add scanned documents to Evernote. And they all say it can only (or at least best) be done with the aid of a Fujitsu ScanSnap or another Evernote-enabled scanner. Oh yes, just press the specifically created “scan-to-evernote”-button with the green elephant, and you can directly send any scanned document into an Evernote folder to your choosing.

Sure. You absolutely can, and I’m sure it works great. But it comes with a cost of at least 200 to well over 500 USD.

Now I have a scanner. More than good enough for your everyday documents, and even your more occasional picture scans. No Evernote button though. Doesn’t matter. I don’t need it. Every document I scan is automatically imported into a specific Evernote folder. No additional actions required. Nor any expensive new scanners.

Here’s how I did it.

Every document you scan, is saved in a specific folder. For some it’s the “Pictures” folder, for others “Toolbox” or whatever. Find out which it is for your scanner.

Evernote has an “Import maps” function. You find it in your dropdown menu under “Extra”. Add the abovementioned folder. Does your scanner create submaps? Then choose “yes” in the options. You can choose in which folder your scanned files will appear. You can delete the files in the source folder, or keep them.

And that’s it! You’re good to go.