I don’t know why, but I am hopeless with filing all my bills into the filing cabinet at home. I file at work and I guess its one thing I don’t want to do when I get home.
I came up with an awesome idea of scanning my bills to PDF and storing them on my hard drive for future reference, I can just look them up and there they are. But I hit a snag. My scanner doesn’t scan to PDF, but the Ricoh Alficio here at work does a direct to PDF to either my directory or email.
Then I realised that I don’t have to do much scanning at all. When I think about it, I have opted to have most of my bills delivered by email, and they always arrive in PDF format. At present I get my power, mobile and homeline/internet bills by PDF. There would be little scanning involved.
Then the question of where to store the bills. I figured seeing as I have a Workspace Live account with Microsoft, that I would give that a go as the one stop place to store my files in the “cloud”.
I struck a technical hitch. As I recently switched to using Chrome at work and home, Microsoft won’t allow me to access Workspace Live from Chrome:-
To use Microsoft Office Live, your computer must meet one of the following requirements:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8 running on Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, or Windows Vista. You can download Internet Explorer from the Internet Explorer page.
Mozilla Firefox running on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, or Mac OS X 10.2.x and later. You can download Firefox from the Firefox download page.
Oh No! I might have to go and look at moving all my data to the Google Monster instead. At least I know I can access the Google Monster once I get my iPhone.
But so far, I am happy with storing my bills on Google. It will just be a test of my procrastination and inabillity to stick with anything that will be the determining factor of whether this project is a success or miserable failure.
Its all about who can adapt/evolve the quickest these days on the internet. Whilst I will miss the in-excel ability to open up files from Workspace Live, I am loving my new life in the cloud. Open source wins again.
You could purchase the Psycik Productions Personal Archive which scans and indexes your documents. It does keep them on your local harddrive, so does assume you know how to run backups. But you could live drive sync the hard drive to the cloud if you so desire.