Customer Reviews

OrganizeMy Electronic Filing Cabinet For Dummies [Old Version]

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I considered this product head-to-head with "Neat Receipts" as an attempt to tame the paper clutter that rules my home office. My needs were simple: When something comes in the mail, etc., pop it onto my sheet-fed duplexing scanner, open up the program, and file it within a couple clicks. Thought it would be easy.

If everything I ever had was a single page, this may come a lot closer. However, how many bills or statements do you get in the mail that are only one page?? Not too many. OrganizeMy doesn't handle this too well. It only recognizes the last page scanned. Not too useful. I also emailed tech support 2+ weeks ago (they graciously give you '30 free days' of tech support) and have yet to hear anything from them.

That aside, I'm not overly impressed by their layout. They strive to make every folder the same, but this is a classic case of 'one size does not fit all'. For instance, it's designed to plop every category into one folder, further subdivided by months. But it would be more useful for further subdivision of categories: Instead of just "bills", I want 'electric bill', 'water bill', 'cable bill', etc., so I don't have to rely so much on intelligently naming each file as it is saved. I'd prefer to predefine my needs, and click on 'electric bill', maybe 'december 2007', then click 'scan'. Wait for the scanner to finish, then feed the originals into the shredder. They way it is set up now, it's too much of a task- much easier to open up the file cabinet, and just file the original away. Which is what I was trying to get away from.

Maybe someday this will develop into something cool...in the meantime, I'm going to try to figure out how to get my money back. There's a 'no returns' policy on software (for good reason, I know), but I've got to find a way to recoup an investment I'll never use.

I was offered this package as a promo for another purchase. I already have a filing system - a combination of folders and spreadsheets. This would add a few features, like summaries and such. But it turns out to only support Outlook and OE, rendering that feature null. I decided the extra features were not worth all the work of transferring the data.

With your own folder structure, a free PDF printer, and a free Office suite Like OpenOffice, you can set this up yourself. Add a free simple backup system like FileHamster and you're good to go. Then you have what you need, it's fully customizable and easy to work with. More importantly, nothing is lost if you change computers and the software is no longer supported. Key points - use open standards, back up to open formats like Zip, and get in the habit of using good file and folder names.