5 ms·

Google, HelloFax, Expensify And Others Want You To Go Paperless In 2013

dexter313 14y ago
I hope in the future every person will have a personal A4 sized device capable of displaying text and pictures of every format from any source.
- esrauch 14y ago
  I hope we just have everything in digital non-fixed size formats so we can display them easily on a device of any size.
  - jfoutz 14y ago
    Yeah, but what about stuff where the format really matters? Most people want numbers on receipts to line up vertically. There exist spreadsheet looking reports that are just big tables of numbers. There are, perhaps, ways of presenting that data in a more fluid layout friendly way, but that's not an easy thing to do.
- dman 14y ago
  Apart from DRM that dream could be a reality fairly soon.
- binarysoul 14y ago
  can you give an example of how this is really a problem? I have an iPad that can display PDFs. When I scan documents PDFs get created.
mseebach 14y ago
This was discussed yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4993463 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4993463
jpswade 14y ago
I went paperless back in 2011[1], never looked back since. [1] http://www.devotedit.com/2011/11/09/paperless-office/ http://www.devotedit.com/2011/11/09/paperless-office/
rednukleus 14y ago
I've tried paperless. I hated it. Having printouts that you can write on and highlight and put tags on can make work so much easier in a lot of cases.
- mkilling 14y ago
  This is also a problem with e-books: There's no way to just scribble something on the pages. I hope there will be a solution for this soon.
pizza_ 14y ago
Sweet, let me write that down.
cmbaus 14y ago
As someone who has spent most of his career in report creation and management (specifically in financial asset management), I find the current state of enterprise reporting in flux. In finance, most documents are still laid out for print (PDFs, Word Docs, and even PowerPoints), but users are printing them less frequently and viewing them either online or on their tablets, and IMO the user experience leaves a lot to be desired. At the same time, there is so much tooling and infrastructure out there for print, that change is slow. There is a whole layer of increasingly senior managers from my generation who grew up with Microsoft Office, and are slow moving toward new reporting technologies. As a technologist this can be frustrating (see: http://baus.net/documents-are-skeuomorphic http://baus.net/documents-are-skeuomorphic), but change is inevitable.
- supercanuck 14y ago
  Tell me about it. I run into this a lot. Companies spend these vast fortunes on ERP and Data warehouses only to have the final output be PDF Crystal Report documents or 500,000 line item exports into Excel.
  - cmbaus 14y ago
    As a technologist I sometimes forget that for many office workers their tool kit is Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. They can't imagine a world where they don't spend most of their time using those applications. At times I see what people do with Microsoft Office, and I'm dumbfounded by the inefficiency. I think the consumer part of this technology cycle is pretty well played out, but there is still a lot to be done for businesses. I'm calling for the death of what I call the "PC operator," which many office workers are. I think the valley is going to catch on to this in the next year.
    - memset 14y ago
      I used to (vehemently!) agree with this sentiment! Then, for a startup I worked for, I said "Enough is enough. I'm going to automate this report for you and it will be so much better!" I was automating a 12-step Excel-macro-vlookup-pivot-table report. I was using python. And boy was it a pain. Have you ever tried implementing pivot-table functionality in python? Holy smokes. (You can use numpy, but seriously don't add that as a production dependency if you can help it. There is some pivot table library but it doesn't actually do all the things real pivot tables do.) First you filter on column A, then sort by column B, then vlookup, then pivot, then... oof. Shoot me now. And don't get me started on matplotlib. It is theoretically great, but doesn't work on OSX, which is what I was using as my dev machine. What a cluster. My point being that, in my limited experience, I really couldn't imagine a world where devs had to write tools to do things that Excel has been doing for decades! And without any intervention from the dev team too!
milesf 14y ago
I've been hearing about the "paperless office" since the mid-80's. What is needed is not something to replace paper, but something better. For example, the paper memo was replaced by email. Paper is just another technology, and a very good one at that.
memset 14y ago
I keep trying to get my dad to get rid of his landline. But he won't, because he sends faxes. "Here," I said, "try this." I showed him HelloFax. That was a no-go, citing privacy concerns. How can he be sure they aren't stealing or saving his personal information? Even if their ToS says so, there's no way to know. And most faxes are for things like insurance, which have SSN's, etc. "But you realize," I said, "that every fax you send nowadays is going to someone's email. Nobody is receiving physical faxes anymore." Sure, he said, but then he is no longer the one responsible. He's savvy enough to read the news and read about awful terms of service changes, privacy breaches, and startups and services going out of business. Plus, he reasons, what if you lose internet? There's no substitute for a physical paper record. (What if the house burns down? Well, he has a scanned copy on his computer too. We could go on forever.) And even if there was a substitute for a physical paper record, it is hard to give peace of mind to my old man about whether hard or soft copies are admissible in court. When are soft copies admissible in court anyway? So unless some service (somehow) is able to give privacy peace of mind to my dad and address all of his issues... it is unlikely I would be able to convince him to move into this century with respect to his personal information, documents, and finances. What startup is solving that?
- boas 14y ago
  Many (most?) hospitals still use fax machines to get medical records from outside hospitals. There's not really a good alternative yet. Radiology studies are still mostly sent on CD or DVD. We're actually working on solving a small part of this problem -- see claripacs.com. Due to FDA and liability issues, we're going after the research and education market before tackling the clinical market.
dangoldin 14y ago
I wonder if these companies are themselves paperless? While I admire the movement too much business still happens on paper. In our case, we can't go entirely paperless due to the government and lawyers. There are too many things we need to send snail-mail but here's hoping that changes.
- joelandren 14y ago
  Can't speak for the other members, but HelloFax has been completely paperless since inception.

I hope in the future every person will have a personal A4 sized device capable of displaying text and pictures of every format from any source.

esrauch 14y ago
I hope we just have everything in digital non-fixed size formats so we can display them easily on a device of any size.
- jfoutz 14y ago
  Yeah, but what about stuff where the format really matters? Most people want numbers on receipts to line up vertically. There exist spreadsheet looking reports that are just big tables of numbers. There are, perhaps, ways of presenting that data in a more fluid layout friendly way, but that's not an easy thing to do.
dman 14y ago
Apart from DRM that dream could be a reality fairly soon.
binarysoul 14y ago
can you give an example of how this is really a problem? I have an iPad that can display PDFs. When I scan documents PDFs get created.

mseebach 14y ago

This was discussed yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4993463 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4993463

jpswade 14y ago

I went paperless back in 2011[1], never looked back since. [1] http://www.devotedit.com/2011/11/09/paperless-office/ http://www.devotedit.com/2011/11/09/paperless-office/

rednukleus 14y ago

I've tried paperless. I hated it. Having printouts that you can write on and highlight and put tags on can make work so much easier in a lot of cases.

mkilling 14y ago
This is also a problem with e-books: There's no way to just scribble something on the pages. I hope there will be a solution for this soon.

pizza_ 14y ago

Sweet, let me write that down.

cmbaus 14y ago

As someone who has spent most of his career in report creation and management (specifically in financial asset management), I find the current state of enterprise reporting in flux. In finance, most documents are still laid out for print (PDFs, Word Docs, and even PowerPoints), but users are printing them less frequently and viewing them either online or on their tablets, and IMO the user experience leaves a lot to be desired. At the same time, there is so much tooling and infrastructure out there for print, that change is slow. There is a whole layer of increasingly senior managers from my generation who grew up with Microsoft Office, and are slow moving toward new reporting technologies. As a technologist this can be frustrating (see: http://baus.net/documents-are-skeuomorphic http://baus.net/documents-are-skeuomorphic), but change is inevitable.

supercanuck 14y ago
Tell me about it. I run into this a lot. Companies spend these vast fortunes on ERP and Data warehouses only to have the final output be PDF Crystal Report documents or 500,000 line item exports into Excel.
- cmbaus 14y ago
  As a technologist I sometimes forget that for many office workers their tool kit is Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. They can't imagine a world where they don't spend most of their time using those applications. At times I see what people do with Microsoft Office, and I'm dumbfounded by the inefficiency. I think the consumer part of this technology cycle is pretty well played out, but there is still a lot to be done for businesses. I'm calling for the death of what I call the "PC operator," which many office workers are. I think the valley is going to catch on to this in the next year.
  - memset 14y ago
    I used to (vehemently!) agree with this sentiment! Then, for a startup I worked for, I said "Enough is enough. I'm going to automate this report for you and it will be so much better!" I was automating a 12-step Excel-macro-vlookup-pivot-table report. I was using python. And boy was it a pain. Have you ever tried implementing pivot-table functionality in python? Holy smokes. (You can use numpy, but seriously don't add that as a production dependency if you can help it. There is some pivot table library but it doesn't actually do all the things real pivot tables do.) First you filter on column A, then sort by column B, then vlookup, then pivot, then... oof. Shoot me now. And don't get me started on matplotlib. It is theoretically great, but doesn't work on OSX, which is what I was using as my dev machine. What a cluster. My point being that, in my limited experience, I really couldn't imagine a world where devs had to write tools to do things that Excel has been doing for decades! And without any intervention from the dev team too!

milesf 14y ago

I've been hearing about the "paperless office" since the mid-80's. What is needed is not something to replace paper, but something better. For example, the paper memo was replaced by email. Paper is just another technology, and a very good one at that.

memset 14y ago

I keep trying to get my dad to get rid of his landline. But he won't, because he sends faxes. "Here," I said, "try this." I showed him HelloFax. That was a no-go, citing privacy concerns. How can he be sure they aren't stealing or saving his personal information? Even if their ToS says so, there's no way to know. And most faxes are for things like insurance, which have SSN's, etc. "But you realize," I said, "that every fax you send nowadays is going to someone's email. Nobody is receiving physical faxes anymore." Sure, he said, but then he is no longer the one responsible. He's savvy enough to read the news and read about awful terms of service changes, privacy breaches, and startups and services going out of business. Plus, he reasons, what if you lose internet? There's no substitute for a physical paper record. (What if the house burns down? Well, he has a scanned copy on his computer too. We could go on forever.) And even if there was a substitute for a physical paper record, it is hard to give peace of mind to my old man about whether hard or soft copies are admissible in court. When are soft copies admissible in court anyway? So unless some service (somehow) is able to give privacy peace of mind to my dad and address all of his issues... it is unlikely I would be able to convince him to move into this century with respect to his personal information, documents, and finances. What startup is solving that?

boas 14y ago
Many (most?) hospitals still use fax machines to get medical records from outside hospitals. There's not really a good alternative yet. Radiology studies are still mostly sent on CD or DVD. We're actually working on solving a small part of this problem -- see claripacs.com. Due to FDA and liability issues, we're going after the research and education market before tackling the clinical market.

dangoldin 14y ago

I wonder if these companies are themselves paperless? While I admire the movement too much business still happens on paper. In our case, we can't go entirely paperless due to the government and lawyers. There are too many things we need to send snail-mail but here's hoping that changes.

joelandren 14y ago
Can't speak for the other members, but HelloFax has been completely paperless since inception.