Voice Over: In this lesson,
we are going to talk about scanning services.
Now, up to this point,
we've talked a lot about printers
but we haven't really talked
about some of the other functions of these MFDs
known as Multifunction Devices."
And the biggest one of these is the ability to do scanning.
This scanning capability allows your printer
to be used essentially as a copy machine or a scanner,
where it can turn a physical piece of paper
into a digital copy as a PDF or other format,
that you can then manipulate on your system.
In addition to this, a lot of multifunction devices
also include a fax machine built-in
if you connect your device to a phone line
so it can send and receive faxes.
These days, faxes aren't really that popular,
and instead most people will scan something
and send it by email instead.
And this brings us to the use of a scanner.
Now, a scanner is simply a digital imaging device
that's designed to create computer files
from a real life object,
most typically a flat object
like a piece of paper, a receipt,
a photograph or a business card.
In its most basic form,
a scanner would simply take a picture of that item
and then create it as a PDF for you to be able to manipulate
on your desktop or laptop.
But a lot of scanners also use something known as OCR
or optical character recognition.
This OCR software can be used to convert scanned text
into digital documents that you can then manipulate
using a word processing program.
Personally, I have found this feature
to be remarkably helpful when I go into a new organization
and they have lots of old hard copies of documents
but they don't have the documents in electronic format.
So I can't find the original of some memo
that was written five years ago
but I do have a piece of paper with that memo on it.
I can then scan it
and using OCR or optical character recognition
I can turn that back into text
and manipulate it to update that memo
and then send out that updated version
to all of my current employees.
When working with a scanner,
there are two basic ways
to get information into that scanner.
The primary method that all scanners tend to support
is known as a flatbed scanner.
When you open up the top of the multifunction device,
you'll see a large glass panel.
You'll put the document on that, you'll close the lid
and then it will scan across that glass
in order to convert that document into a digital file.
This works by using a system of mirrors and lights
to be able to illuminate that image
and capture that image onto the lens,
that can then be converted into ones and zeros
representing the different red, green
and blue components of that image.
Now, a flatbed scanner works really well
when you have to scan in one document,
or one brochure, or one business card.
But if I wanted to scan 500 pages into a PDF
that would take me a really long time
of having to put the first page down,
scan it, take that off,
put the second page down,
scan it, take it off
and keep doing that 500 times.
That would be really boring and take me a long time.
So instead, I prefer to use an ADF,
which stands for "Automatic Document Feeder."
If your multifunction device supports an ADF,
this is going to allow you to put a stack of papers
in the top of the device,
press the button to scan
and it will feed each one in individually,
scan it and put all of that into a single file
such as a PDF for you.
By default, most automatic document feeders
will only read one side of your document
but some of the higher-end machines
you'll find in office environments
will actually have a two-sided ADF.
And this means as the paper is going in,
if there's printing on both sides of it,
it can read both of those sides at the same time
and put them into the file.
Putting the top side is page one
and the bottom side is page two.
So again, if I have 500 pages of double-sided text,
by the time I'm done, I'm going to have a 1,000 page PDF.
And this may only take me 10 or 20 minutes to do
because most automatic document feeders
can read about 5 to 10 pages per minute.
So now that we've scanned in all of these documents
and we have this file,
where does that file go?
Well, there's only four places
that these systems will usually send it to.
The first is going to be directly to your hard drive.
If you have a small multifunction device connected directly
through USB to your home computer,
this is likely what it's doing when you scan something in.
It's going to scan it and then place it into your desktop
or into a file folder on your hard drive.
On the other hand, if you work in an office environment
and you have a network-based multifunction device
it will usually send it either to email,
to a folder or to the cloud.
Many of these multifunction devices can be configured
with an SMTP server
to be able to send email themself.
So when you scan that document,
you'll enter in your email
and it will then create a PDF
and then send that PDF directly to your inbox
using its connection to an SMTP server.
The second place that these networked
multifunction devices will send the file
is usually to a folder.
For example,
when I was the IT director of a large organization,
we had our MFDs set up so they would scan to a folder,
specifically the map folder for each user's home directory,
which was their H drive.
No matter which corporate computer they logged in
they would always be linked to their H drive
and so anything they scanned
would automatically show up right there.
In other organizations, I've seen them have a single place
on the company's share drive
where everything gets scanned.
So when you go and scan your document,
you'll enter a name using the touchscreen display
on the multifunction device
such as "Jason's photocopy,"
and then when you scan that document,
it's going to go into the share drive
into a folder called scans.
Underneath there, there would be the file
"Jason's photocopy."
I would then copy that over to my desktop
and delete it from the company's share drive.
That's another format of doing a scan to folder.
Normally, this relies on something
known as the server message block or SMB,
which is Windows' version of file and print sharing,
specifically, file sharing in this case.
The third place these networked MFDs can send a document
is to the cloud.
Most modern MFDs do support cloud services
like Microsoft's OneDrive, Google Drive,
Dropbox or Apple's iCloud.
Using these options,
if your multifunction device supports scanning to the cloud,
you'll be able to set up your scan job
by giving your file a name and selecting the location
such as this folder in my Google Drive,
and then the device will scan it
directly to that service for you.
When it comes to scanners,
scanners are digital imaging devices
that take flat pieces of paper
and convert them to digital files.
If your system supports it,
you can use optical character recognition
to translate the image of the document
into words that can then be edited in a word processor.
Depending on the scanner you have,
you may either have a flatbed scanner
or one that has an automatic document feeder built-in
to make it much easier for you to scan multi-page documents.
And remember, when it comes to multifunction devices
you can save those scans either directly to your computer
if you're connected over USB,
or you can send those scans to an email,
to a network folder or to the cloud.