For many applications, documents are first placed in a tray before they are archived. Find out which processing options you have in a tray and how you use them to prep your indexing – so that your documents can take a zipline into a file cabinet.
In DocuWare, a tray is primarily used to process documents before they are ultimately stored. A wide range of functions are available to support you there:
Document preparation
- To view a document, a double-click is all that’s needed. For example, if you want to compare documents to decide which of them should be filed, it‘s best to open the second document in another viewer window – either via the menu Open in new viewer window or [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Enter].
You can also combine documents so that they are archived together: invoices and delivery slips, project plans and related meeting notes, and much more. Here you have two options: by stapling, one single PDF is created from several PDF documents; when clipping, individual documents (even different file formats) remain separate but bundled together. In either case, select the desired documents in the order in which they are to be bound, and then click on the corresponding entry in the context menu.
More about stapling, clipping, unstapling and unclipping
- You can change the content of a document by using the Edit option from the context menu. It will then automatically be opened in the program that it is stored on your computer, the default program for the corresponding file type.
- To change the name of a document, use the Rename option [F2].
- Of course, if you aren’t in a completely paperless office, you can also print documents, either individually or several at once. You always have the choice of whether or not annotations made in the viewer should be printed as well.
- For further processing of a document outside DocuWare, you can either download or send it by email. You can choose whether the document should remain in its original format or converted to PDF.
- Last but not least, you can also delete a document from the tray [Del]. But be careful: it will really be deleted and not just moved to a trash can.
A tray's context menu
Indexing
When storing a document in a file cabinet, index terms for the document must be specified in the store dialog. There are various options for automating this process so that you have as little manual work as possible:
- Intelligent Indexing reads out documents in the tray, immediately recognizes keywords, and then uses them to index.
- If you scan documents into your tray using DocuWare Desktop, you can enter index information in the scan configuration.
- The same applies when documents are loaded into your tray via import configuration.
For all automation tools, configurations are always based on the index fields of the file cabinet that is assigned to a tray in its setup configuration. So if you want to prepare the indexing for different file cabinets, its best to set up one tray per file cabinet.
There are also helpful features for manual indexing. You activate them within a store dialog‘s options:
- One option is to enter index terms to documents beforehand – pre-index them – which are then used to file a document automatically later.
- Use index terms already used to complete or enhance your indexing. DocuWare looks at the file cabinet to see how similar documents have already been stored.
- If you are storing several documents, you can index one document and keep these entries and apply them to others. The store dialog is prefilled for the subsequent documents, but you can still make changes as needed.
If you do not need to check over index terms for individual documents, then use the Store all with current index terms
You can open the options of the store dialog using the three dots next to the store button.
Working with multiple trays
To pre-sort documents, it makes sense to set up several different trays. For pre-indexing, it’s also best to have a separate tray for each file cabinet.
You have two options for moving and copying documents from one tray to another: either by using the options from the context menu or via Drag'n'Drop. To copy a document, just hold down the [Ctrl] key. More on this topic in tips #2 and #4 of our article 5 Tips for Trays.
More about making the most of trays...
- Change your view – in a tray
- Do you know your default tray?
- Tray vs. file cabinet: What happens where?
