Paper fry!

Forty years ago this week,  an article in BusinessWeek magazine titled "The Office of the Future", proposed a  radical shift : to the paperless office.  It suggested boldly,  that in 20 years,  most records in offices  would have gone digital. They got it  wrong. Even after twice the predicted time span, we are only  lurching towards a less-paper world.  But the tipping point  has come and it is the humble mobile phone that has done it. 

Millions of phone and phablet owners are asking: I can get the books I read as e-books; the movies I view as e-movies. Then why   am I forced to fill forms often in triplicate!) for registering at the clinics,  to  deposit a cheque, to  buy or sell a property, to do the umpteen things that needed to get a service from government? We can't  clear the paper jam in a day-- but we can reduce the burden of filling and often changing,  all those mandatory forms. Recent editions to some  popular  document management solutions , promise to  let you  create, review, approve, sign and track documents whether on a desktop or mobile device. The leader here has been Adobe's Acrobat, the  most widely used tool to create and read the PDF or Portable Document Format. Adobe has totally reimagined Acrobat  and made it part of what it now calls  the Document Cloud.

Since  Adobe  is  the author  of the industry-standard  photo editing tool, Photoshop , it has cannily  morphed   its functions with the new DocumentCloud  or DC version of Acrobat. I  have been trying it out for a few weeks and it is truly uncanny how swiftly you can snap a photo of any document, save it to the cloud as a PDF, edit it,  match  font   to the original or  change it or  replace the  photo even sign it and password-protect it - all from a mobile device.  The signature part is a new addition to Acrobat, because  DC  now includes another Adobe tool called  eSign. I can assure  you  the photo editing features are nowhere as intimidating as the standalone  and notoriously dummy-user-unfriendly Photoshop.  A feature of DC is  Mobile Link which lets you  access the same documents as you move from  desktop to laptop to phone.  The other new addition to the DC avatar of Acrobat is 'Fill and Sign' which  makes form filling very easy.

The full versions of  Acrobat DC are priced from around Rs 800 per month to a perpetual licence that can set you back Rs 30,000 and more.   As before the  Acrobat reader alone is free. But  you can also download  for free,  a combo of three Android or iOS apps:

• Adobe Acrobat DC Mobile: which allows you to open and view PDFs, add comments, organize pages, and create PDFs from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.
• Adobe Fill & Sign allows you to turn digital files or paper documents into forms you can fill, sign, and send electronically
• Adobe eSign Manager DC, lets you e-sign documents and forms.

Get this trishul  of doc apps on your phone and you are all set to wage war on paper  and reduce your pulp friction!

Forms on the fly

Zoho, India's own office productivity solutions leader  has just launched  Zoho Forms  a cloud-based app that  lets  lay users  create and share mobile and web forms capturing  user data — like customer registrations, orders, surveys, and responses.They can then stores it in the cloud, making it available from any device when ever they choose.

You can fill the forms offline and conveniently sync them  the cloud later, when the device has Internet access. Zoho Forms is free for a single user, for up to three forms  and there are  various plans from $ 10 to $ 50 month for corporate and professional users.  Let's say Jai Ho  to this 'made in India' offering!