Here is a quick tip to help organize your life. Out of the box, OS X has the ability to print to PDF from any application. This is a really helpful feature for a variety of reasons.
If you are like me, you buy most of your things online. Amazon and Newegg are two of my favorite places to shop, they have the best prices and the largest selection of gear. Instead of printing each receipt to paper to archival purposes, why not print to PDF. Spotlight will index PDF’s and that provides a quick method for finding receipts in the future. Using Automator you can enhance the functionality of the “Print to PDF” feature to help organize your receipts.
1. Open Automator and create the following workflow.
You can update the “Copy Finder Items” action to save the PDF in whichever directory you want. I recommend storing in “~/Documents/Personal Receipts” for safe keeping.
2. Save that workflow to “~/Library/PDF Services/” using a name that is descriptive enough for later use. Something like “Save PDF to Personal Receipts” will work nicely. If you want this automator script available to all users on your Mac, save it to “/Library/PDF Services/”.
3. Now print something. Click the PDF button in the lower left and you will see this
Select the name you used above, example ”Save PDF to Personal Receipts” and your PDF file will be saved to the folder you selected. A new finder window will open allowing you to further tweak the filename which is handy when printing from Safari because by default, the filename will contain the title of the page. As you can see, I have other workflows setup, some using additional Automator actions which I might discuss in a later post. Automator rocks!
[...] Using Automator to automate printing to PDF [...]