#HAZEL INSTAL THE NEW VERSION FOR MAC HOW TO#
#HAZEL INSTAL THE NEW VERSION FOR MAC UPGRADE#
#HAZEL INSTAL THE NEW VERSION FOR MAC MAC#

I can’t say I got every rule right the first time, but it was so much fun figuring each one out. David’s instructions were so clear and Hazel is such a good tool that I was able to build them without ever referring back to the video. I watched the first hour of David’s Video Field Guide on Hazel at the gym one day this week and I was so excited I came home and grabbed that giant stack of paper and got to work making rules. If you haven’t listened to David before, you’ll find that he’s clear and concise, but also throws in regular doses of silliness to keep you entertained.

#HAZEL INSTAL THE NEW VERSION FOR MAC HOW TO#

David goes on to show how to have Hazel move the file to your gas bill folder.ĭavid builds the rules up a step at a time, shows you how to test the rules and how to diagnose when they go wonky because you made a mistake. So, for example, instead of scan001.pdf, Hazel will rename it to Gas Bill.pdf. If you scan your documents using an app that applies Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, Hazel will find the date, define a variable using that date, and then rename the document using that date.

In the Hazel Video Field Guide, David shows off one of the powerful new features of Hazel 4, which is the ability to recognize dates inside a PDF. In the Hazel preference pane you first define a folder that you want Hazel to watch, then you create rules on what you want it to do. That turned into a good thing for me since I’d bought it at version 3 and never exercised it.

#HAZEL INSTAL THE NEW VERSION FOR MAC UPGRADE#

Hazel 4 costs $32 from and they have family pack licenses and generous upgrade pricing as well.

#HAZEL INSTAL THE NEW VERSION FOR MAC MAC#

Hazel is a System Preference pane for the Mac that allows you to automate processes involving files and folders. I probably should explain a little bit of what Hazel actually is, and how it works. I really should have patented that “problem to be solved” idea. He hits the main objective pretty quickly and that’s how to have Hazel automatically rename your files and put them away in your folders without you lifting a finger, other than gently guiding the documents into your scanner.Įach lesson is relatively short, starts with a problem to be solved, and gives step-by-step examples of how to solve the problem. Once he gets your feet wet, he adds more and more complexity but does it in a way that’s memorable and clear. This is two and a half hours worth of screencasts that starts with the very first baby steps of using Hazel. This week, David published a Hazel Video Field Guide and sent me a review copy. I even went as far as to buy Hazel and I figured out how to do a couple of cool things with it, but I still had a four inch stack of papers to scan sitting on my filing cabinet next to me. I was afraid that going to his site might be like starting in an upper division calculus class when you forgot to take Algebra 1. I have always meant to go watch some of his videos and read some of his tutorials to figure out how he does it and what’s so cool about Hazel, but I figured I’d never find the part about how to get started.

And then three months later there’s that giant stack again.ĭavid Sparks, aka Mac Sparky, co-host of the Mac Power Users Podcast, and good friend of mine, has been blathering on and on for years about how he uses Hazel to automate scanning of his documents. Pop quiz: would you rather go to the dentist, or scan in that giant pile of papers next to your desk? It’s a tough question, right? You bought that fancy pants scanner everyone was talking about a few years ago, and you committed to going paperless, and you probably bought some storage to file away all of the bills and such, but you still dread the actual job of scanning, am I right? Each time you finally go through them all, you swear to yourself that this time you’ll keep on top of it, this time you’ll do it once a week, this time you won’t let it stack up.

Hazel instal the new version for mac