Why you don't need a printer?
Save time, money and trees by making your home paperless. Here we explain how to break free from your printer.
Print without paper
'Print to PDF' programs are virtual printers. They let you create a high-quality copy of your print job, whether its a document, photo or web page, that can be opened on any platform and takes up very little storage space. Once you've installed a virtual printer such as doPDF (free from www.dopdf.com), your computer recognises it as a printer. Press Ctrl+P or click Print, and instead of choosing your printer from the list, choose 'Print to PDF'. You can also print to PDF in Chrome by right-clicking a web page, choosing print and selecting 'Save as PDF' as the destination. In Office, select XPS Document Writer from the Print menu.
The World Wildlife Fund has come up with a brilliant PDF hack to prevent your email recipients wasting paper. Their modified file format looks and behaves like a PDF but can't be printed on paper. Its called - you guessed it - a WWF. Download the free Windows plug-in from www.saveaswwf.com.
Save whole web pages
PDF is ideal for archiving web pages and other documents, thanks to its high quality, small file size, searchable text and cross-platform compatibility. Its also perfect for capturing entire Twitter feeds and email conversations, since printing a web page to PDF captures everything on that page, not just the area you can see. You can fill the saved PDF with clickable links and other annotations using free software such as CutePDF (www.cutepdf-editor.com) and combine multiple documents into a single PDF using PDFMerge (www.pdfmerge.com).
Find anything in your online filing cabinet
Windows Explorer is about as efficient at keeping your saved documents organised as a wardrobe full of paper. Google Drive (drive.google.com) does a much better job and includes 15GB of free online back-up space, cross-platform syncing and built-in OCR (optical character recognition) that makes everything searchable, including the text content of photos and scans.
You can save entire web pages to Google Drive from Chrome in much the same way as printing to PDF: right-click a web page, select Print and select 'Save to Google Drive' in the destination.
Never forget an idea
Instead of writing things down on paper, use Eve mote (evernote.com) to make notes on your phone. Desktop or on the web, and save them for future reference, synced securely across your devices and browsers. A 'note' can be anything from a couple of words of text to a fully formatted web page, with file attachments. voice memos and anything else you can cram into your 40MB free monthly upload allowance. You can then create notebooks, folders and sub-folders to make everything easy to find. You'll find a huge directory of apps and plug-ins that integrate with Evernote at trunk.everrote.com.
Alternatively, try Scribble for Chrome. It's a simple, elegant "sticky note" app that auto-saves your notes letter by letter as you write them. You can attach alarms and reminders to your sticky notes to make sure you never forget a thing.
'Print to PDF' programs are virtual printers. They let you create a high-quality copy of your print job, whether its a document, photo or web page, that can be opened on any platform and takes up very little storage space. Once you've installed a virtual printer such as doPDF (free from www.dopdf.com), your computer recognises it as a printer. Press Ctrl+P or click Print, and instead of choosing your printer from the list, choose 'Print to PDF'. You can also print to PDF in Chrome by right-clicking a web page, choosing print and selecting 'Save as PDF' as the destination. In Office, select XPS Document Writer from the Print menu.
The World Wildlife Fund has come up with a brilliant PDF hack to prevent your email recipients wasting paper. Their modified file format looks and behaves like a PDF but can't be printed on paper. Its called - you guessed it - a WWF. Download the free Windows plug-in from www.saveaswwf.com.
Save whole web pages
PDF is ideal for archiving web pages and other documents, thanks to its high quality, small file size, searchable text and cross-platform compatibility. Its also perfect for capturing entire Twitter feeds and email conversations, since printing a web page to PDF captures everything on that page, not just the area you can see. You can fill the saved PDF with clickable links and other annotations using free software such as CutePDF (www.cutepdf-editor.com) and combine multiple documents into a single PDF using PDFMerge (www.pdfmerge.com).
Find anything in your online filing cabinet
Windows Explorer is about as efficient at keeping your saved documents organised as a wardrobe full of paper. Google Drive (drive.google.com) does a much better job and includes 15GB of free online back-up space, cross-platform syncing and built-in OCR (optical character recognition) that makes everything searchable, including the text content of photos and scans.
You can save entire web pages to Google Drive from Chrome in much the same way as printing to PDF: right-click a web page, select Print and select 'Save to Google Drive' in the destination.
Never forget an idea
Instead of writing things down on paper, use Eve mote (evernote.com) to make notes on your phone. Desktop or on the web, and save them for future reference, synced securely across your devices and browsers. A 'note' can be anything from a couple of words of text to a fully formatted web page, with file attachments. voice memos and anything else you can cram into your 40MB free monthly upload allowance. You can then create notebooks, folders and sub-folders to make everything easy to find. You'll find a huge directory of apps and plug-ins that integrate with Evernote at trunk.everrote.com.
Alternatively, try Scribble for Chrome. It's a simple, elegant "sticky note" app that auto-saves your notes letter by letter as you write them. You can attach alarms and reminders to your sticky notes to make sure you never forget a thing.
Sign any document electronically
When signing a legal document, you may assume there's no way to avoid putting pen to paper, but electronic-signature software is legally binding and can save time, postage and travel costs as well as paper.
Signsquid uses authentication codes as signatures. You "sign" PDF forms using unique information that must be verified twice, by email and by phone. The process is designed to ensure authenticity and privacy, but it's very quick and easy. All files are encrypted on Signsquid's database, but you get a readable PDF for your records. You can try the service for free for a month, without entering your card details, after which it costs £3 per month. Download the Chrome app from http://bit.ly/156eMWB.
Another useful Chrome app is Signature Grabber, which lets you save your hand signature as a PNG file for official reasons or just for posterity.
Never lose another receipt
Digital Receipts is a free Android app that lets you scan your paper receipts with your phone's camera. The scans are text-searchable and very high quality, and you can stitch them together, attach them to emails and upload them securely to the cloud. Most of your receipts and tickets are likely to be paperless already if you shop online, but if you need to keep track of lots of receipts, you can print them to PDF and use CutePDF and PDFMerge to annotate and organise them.
Get things done with to-do lists
To-do quickly becomes forgot-to-do if you scribble your chores on bits of paper and lose them. Do It Tomorrow (tomorrow.do) is a very simple app that keeps all your to-dos in one place and lets you assign tasks to today or tomorrow. When they're done, click or tap to tick them off. There are versions for Chrome (http://bit.ly/183y6K9) and Android (http://bit.ly/12xHldF). Bucketlistly is a variation on the theme. Create a list of things you want to do in your life, and get a virtual reward for each one you tick off.
Manage any project
Wunderlist is an invaluable tool if you're moving home or planning the trip of a lifetime. It lets you create and manage as many to-do lists as you want in one place, and invite collaborators, create recurring tasks and reminders, and set up phone notifications. There are free versions for Windows (www.wunderlist.com), iOS and Android (http://bit.ly/182GfeB), so you can keep your project synced between devices and in the cloud.
Team box is a more professional product. but it's free for up to five users. It includes some brilliant collaboration tools such as Conversations, which lets you discuss your project in a Facebook-style private network, as well as secure file-sharing and task-management tools for assigning people and deadlines to different jobs. Teambox integrates with Dropbox, Gmail and other cloud services and has apps for Chrome (http://bit.ly/182GwhF), iOS and Android (http://bit.ly/11uR49P).
Ditch your pencil and ruler
Drawing plans should be the least messy part of a DIY project, but not if you end up with a big pile of paper covered in crossed-out plans. Autodesk Homestyler (homestyler.com) lets you do it all online by uploading a JPEG floor plan, and dragging and dropping various items onto it, from windows to floor tiles. You can colour them, annotate them and move them around until you're happy. then take a 360-degree snapshot so you can look at the plan from every angle.
Design Your Home lets you create cartoon-style house plans on your phone, and SmartMeasure turns your phone into a tape measure.
Lucidchart is for maths rather than DIY, but it's potentially just as fun. You can create all sorts of graphs including flowcharts, bar charts and mind maps, edit them collaboratively and export them to Google Drive.
Scribble Maps is a browser-based tool that lets you annotate online maps including Google Maps and OpenStreetMap. You can then export your scribblings as a JPEG or to your Google account.
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