PDFPen from Smile Software is one of those apps I’d heard about for a long time. I’d always thought it sounded great, but I didn’t think I needed it and it was pricey.
When an iPad version was released at a much more affordable price, I grabbed it. I was impressed with it and could see some uses for it, I didn’t have many PDFs in my life, but I was glad to add this app to my iPad’s toolbox.
After reading David Sparks’s excellent ebook Paperless, I ordered a document scanner and set out to create a paperless workflow for my job.
I have to submit a time sheet every two weeks to my supervisor. (well, his secretary, actually) This involved the following steps.
Take blank time sheet out of my desk drawer.
If it was the last sheet, take it down the hall to make copies
Fill out the form, take it down the hall to make a copy for my records.
Put a copy in an envelope and walk downstairs to put it in the inter-office mail
Wait for phone call from my supervisor’s secretary asking me where it was.
Sometimes, she would get it that day, sometimes the next. Occasionally, I would have to drive across campus and deliver another copy to her since it never arrived. I decided this time sheet procedure was a perfect candidate for going paperless.
I asked for the original document to be emailed to me in a digital form (for 4 years I had simply been making photocopies of the original I got when I started working here.) It was sent to me as a Word document which I then saved as a PDF and placed in a Dropbox folder. When it came time to submit a time sheet, I would open PDFPen on my iPad, open the document from Dropbox, fill it out with my finger (or a stylus, the one time I actually found a stylus useful on an iPad), email a copy to the secretary, and upload a copy to my Dropbox. Using Hazel, the file would be moved to it’s proper location on my Dropbox for storage if I ever needed to get it again. (This whole process of using Noodlesoft’s Hazel and Dropbox is detailed in Paperless and that section alone is worth 10 times the price of the book.)
This process worked great for several months. PDFPen for iPad was all I really needed. When the iPhone version arrived, I grabbed that too. Even if I am not in my office if front of my Mac, I can get this paperwork submitted quickly and easily.
Things changed this fall. A large part of my job is to serve as technical director for the plays and musicals that get produced on campus. This fall, I decided to scan the scripts of the two shows I was working on and make all my notes on them using PDFPen on my iPad. Using a stylus was producing poor results as was trying to add text fields to type in. On small PDFs like my time sheet, these methods had worked great, but for making notes on 100 plus page PDFs it’s a cumbersome process.
I downloaded a free trial of PDFPen for Mac. An hour later I purchased it; this was the perfect way to make notes on these scripts. They would then sync to iCloud and be available for further mark up on my iPad while working on the shows. I could even get to them with PDFPen for iPhone if I needed. I purchased the basic version of PDFPen, as I didn’t see the need for the features in the Pro version that costs $40 more. This has been an excellent way for me to manage 100+ page scripts I need to make technical notes on, and beats lugging massive, chewed- up revised and re-revised scripts around.
Things changed again last week. I was listening to an episode of Mac Power Users and they were discussing their sponsor, Smile Software, the makers of PDFPen. Usually I will just fast forward these ad spots since I already own and use the app but this time I just let it play. The hosts, David and Katie, were talking about PDFPen Pro, and how you can use it to make PDF forms. Then I had an A-ha moment. Instead of filling out my time sheets using a stylus and inserting multiple text fields, I could create a PDF form, then tap on cells and automatically have a text field there. Luckily, Smile Software does have a way to upgrade from PDFPen to PDFPen Pro just by paying the $40 difference in the cost.
In the past year with PDFPen, I’ve gone from “Don’t need it” to “The iPad Version is all I need” to “I just bought the Pro version”.
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