(Archived) Tags versus OCR searches

[Tudorman 0]

I'm giving EN a try as a depository for records, paper and other wise. I'm scanning documents into EN with no problem, but I'm at a loss as to how detailed I should be with tagging. I've recently scanned some bank statements, product instructions and warranty info, and home improvement receipts into EN, but I'm looking for suggestions for setting up tags. For instance, should I bother tagging a receipt with the name of the store (Lowes), the date (month? year?), the project (kitchen), and so forth, or ought I simply tag it "receipt" and rely on the OCR and search feature to find it if needed?

I don't want to bury myself in tags (I've never used tags in any program before), but I don't want to loose information in the program either.

Any helpful hints or suggestions?

[crane 40]

I find that I tag notes where I'm not sure that the search will find something. For instance, with your lowes receipt. I'd scan a couple in, and then try to do a search for Lowe's. Does the search find those receipts? If not, maybe you want to tag them with the store name. If the name of the store is not important, then no big deal. As for the dates, you could just use the creation date as a rough idea as to when the receipt occurred (assuming you scan your receipts in relatively quickly). I would never bother tagging with dates because you'll have an arbitrarily large number of tags at some point. You can also manually change the creation or subject date (at least in Windows) for a note, and then use that in your search queries.

For your example, I probably would add tags for the project, that way you can find all the receipts for a particular renovation. So, for your example, I would probably use tags like: "receipt", "kitchen".

Also, instead of tagging (if you don't want a lot of tags), you could add keywords to the note itself. For instance, you could scan in a receipt, and then just type in Lowe's Receipt - Kitchen Counter. Then, you could search for any or all of those words. In EN, you can use the _ to make a word easier to search, e.g., _kitchen can be searched and find just those notes that you have specifically marked with _kitchen. Otherwise, "kitchen" will find ALL notes with kitchen in them.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

I use titles & keywords. IE, if it were a Lowe's receipt dated 10/20/09, I'd set the title to Lowe's 20091020. Using YYYYMMDD format for dates will allow you to sort all notes with a title of Lowe's YYYYMMDD chronologically.

BTW, if you're putting your bank statements in a sync'd folder, you may want to rethink that. Search the message board for 'sensitive' and look through some of the many threads on the subject. Here's one to get you started:

viewtopic.php?f=30&t=9583&p=47715&hilit=sensitive+information#p47715

[Tudorman 0]

Thanks for the replies. And I'll certainly take a look at the security info.