This Linux and Windows app makes managing all your documents easier

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.

Because I'm a writer, I keep a lot of documents . By a lot, I mean hundreds. I need a way to organize my documents and avoid chaos.

I could organize the documents manually, but that would take a very long time. On top of that, searching by hand is a hit-or-miss process.

That's where Paperwork comes into play. This simple (yet very effective) tool allows you to add documents, move the documents (to organize them), search them (by title or even within the body), export them, add keywords and labels to documents, view document properties, search by keyword(s), and change the document view.

Also: This free tool keeps my bookmarks synced across Chrome, Firefox, and Edge - here's how

The Paperwork feature list includes scanner support, PDF support, auto-detection of page orientation, OCR, document labels, auto-guessing of labels to apply to new documents, search, keyword suggestions, and quick scan edits.

Paperwork is free and can be installed on any Linux distribution and even Windows. Naturally, I installed the app on Linux ( Pop!_OS to be exact).

How you use Paperwork will depend on your workflow and the types of documents you import. You can import almost any document needed, such as PDF, DOCX, ODT, and more.

Here's how I make the most out of Paperwork.

Also: I've used nearly every browser out there, and these are my top 4 (spoiler: Chrome is out)

First, I import documents. Paperwork is local-only app, so you aren't uploading any to a third party. To import your documents, click the Import File(s) button and your file manager will open. Navigate to the directory housing the files and select those to be imported (you can do a multi-select by holding down the Ctrl key as you select). After you've selected all of the files you want, click Open (in the file picker), and Paperwork makes copies of those documents in the ~/papers directory but does not alter the originals.

Next, I select a document from the sidebar and then click the document properties icon (the eye). In the resulting sidebar, I add as many keywords as needed and change the keyword colors as required. Click Apply, and I'm done.

Add as many keywords as needed to help make your documents even more searchable.

Then I go through all the documents I've imported during that session and continue adding keywords to each. This step is important because it makes the documents much easier to search.