Now that you have created a profile and rearranged your visual layout, you are fully ready to start importing and indexing documents. Let’s first take a look at the navigation menu. In the top right corner, you can access the drop-down settings menu by hitting the dropdown arrow, available on the right of the rounded rectangle containing your picture or the initials of the name linked to the email address you registered with. 



Left of this, you will notice a question mark icon. This will take you to our customer support page, which has a multitude of articles explaining the various functionalities of REV.

                                                                                           


Further to the left, the next icon is a folded paper plane with a downward pointing arrow on its right. This is the “Distribute” icon which gives you access to three options: 



 


1. Download Originals

This will allow you, once you have indexed documents from various sources, to download all the source material into one place.

2. Printable PDF

This will allow you to export all the indexed documents into one single PDF to make it easy to distribute them to anyone.

3. Email

This will allow you to send your indexed documents (or a selection of them) as an attachment to a specific email address or group of addresses.



Next, to the left, the “+” sign icon, is your button to return to the Index Screen when you are in the Search Screen.

 

 

These screens are the two basic interfaces in REV. The “+” sign and the binocular icon allow you to navigate back and forth between both screens.

 


For now, the “+” sign is grayed out as you are currently on this screen but if you hit the next button to the left, that is the binoculars icon, it will take you to the Search Screen. Suddenly the plus sign is back to blue and will allow you to switch back to the Index Screen.



While we are on the Search Screen, try to explore the Settings drop-down menu, available on the top right part of the screen. It can be accessed by hitting the downward pointing arrow on the right of the rounded rectangle. 
Notice how the options there have now changed. 
This is due to the fact that this menu is contextual, which means that it modulates the available options based on the screen you are currently viewing. In this specific case, you will lose access to the 3 previous toggles and will gain access to a new one called “Multi repo”. This option allows you to search multiple repositories at the same time. 
Just like all the other toggles, you can slide this one by clicking or tapping in the grey zone where “OFF” is written. This will move the toggle to the right, turn the rectangle green, and let you know that it’s now “ON”. 
Notice, on the top left part of the central window,  that the top field (the one with a toolbox icon on its left) has suddenly changed.





The name of the repository there has an “x” on its right, which allows you to deselect it when there are more than one selected repositories in the field. To select other repositories, simply hit the downward pointing arrow on the right of this field and click or tap on the desired repository. You will see them populate the field and you can delete them right back, as long as there is at least one repository selected.






If you hit the “+” sign icon to switch back to the Index Screen, you will see the other icons in the navigation bar. These are the functional buttons:

The “x”:
 

 

This button allows you to delete selected documents. You can select multiple documents or just one and will get a confirmation window after pressing that button. This will make sure that you really wish to delete the selected files. For the moment, as you haven’t imported any documents, this button is grayed out but as soon as you start your indexing process, it will be a key part of your navigation.



The scan image symbol:

This button allows you to scan documents directly into REV. To do so, you will require a native application that needs to be installed into your system in order to bridge your scanner and the REV browser-based app. This process can take a few minutes and will be covered more extensively in another tutorial. For now, just know that this is the button to enable direct scanning.  

The image symbol:

This button is one of the other ways to import a document into REV. It allows you to attach a document by opening a file explorer window, in order to navigate to the proper folder where the desired item is located. It’s a very functional button but you might not use it much as there are 2 other ways to execute this same task.

 

The first way is to drag and drop your document. For users that are familiar with that approach, this is likely the most intuitive way as it is very visual and doesn’t require much linear thinking. Simply open a file explorer in your computer, click and hold it and then drag the file to your REV interface to release it there. Make sure to drop it in the appropriate window within the REV interface, the one on the left of the screen (if you haven’t rearranged the layout).

 

 

In any case, if you keep an eye on your cursor, you’ll know whether it’s the right window or not as you will see one of two things underneath your cursor to the right: a red circle with a diagonal bar (which tells you that this is not an appropriate location to drop your document) or a blue “+” sign accompanied by the word “copy” (which tells you that it’s a green light for you to drop). 

 

If you’ve used such a method in any other app, you are likely going to love this way of importing documents into REV as you will be able to quickly drag and drop multiple files from various locations by opening all the desired windows simultaneously. A quick tip is to hold the “shift” key while you click on multiple items to select them all at the same time. Another tip is to use ctrl-A (or command-A on mac) to select all the files in any given window and drag and drop the whole thing into REV. 


For an unaccustomed user, drag and drop might feel a bit counterintuitive. So the next method might feel a lot more straightforward. The big blue “browse to files” buttons in the middle of the document loading window, on the left side of your interface will open a file explorer window. From there you can navigate to the location of your document just like you would in any other application. Hit open at the bottom right of the file explorer menu to load your document and return to REV. 



 

 

Using this method, the ctrl-A (Command-A) option to select all the files within a specific window will still be fully functional. However, the multiple selection trick using the “shift” key will likely not allow you to select files that are not one after the other in a list. Holding the “shift” key will however allow you to select multiple files by moving up and down with the arrows on your keyboard, as long and the files are in a continuous list.

 

Finally, to wrap up this overview of how to navigate in REV, let’s take a look at how to index documents once you have imported them. This process is fairly simple as all you will need to do is, populate the index fields on the right side of the screen.  The first field is the repository. If you are using REV for personal use, it is called “My files” and it’s the only repository. The next steps, in the personal use sequence, are pretty simple. First, select the type of document by hitting the downward pointing arrow next to “type of files” and pick one of the suggested options. You can then pick a date in the field right underneath it and hit the “save” button once you're done. Your document just got indexed and you will be able to retrieve it using the information you selected.




There is a method to customize the choices in the drop-down menu linked to these fields as well as the names of the fields themselves. This allows you to fully customize your indexing experience. We will get deeper into those options in subsequent tutorials. For now, let’s take a look at the standard business mode to give you an idea of that process in case you selected it when you created your REV account.

 

The process is relatively similar with the difference that the indexing field varies according to the type of repository that you first choose.


The “Accounts Receivable” repository will give you the option to fill up 4 fields:


Customer Name

Invoice Number

Invoice Date

Document Type


The “Accounts Payable” repository will give you 6 different fields to fill up:

Vendor Name

PO Number

PO Date

Invoice Number

Invoice Date

Document Type



The Employee Files repository allows you to fill up 5 fields: 

Employee Name

Employee Number

Hire Date

Status

Document Type




Once again all these fields can be fully customized and the information filled in each can be made mandatory or optional. This gives you complete control over your indexing process and makes REV a very versatile tool to archive any type of document.



Once you have filled up each field, simply hit the blue “save” button and your document will be indexed into the selected repository. If you have multiple documents, REV will index all of them by default using the indexes you just created. This allows you to batch process multiple documents and to split large batches into as many documents as you need. This process, which might come in very handy for some power users, will be explained in detail in later tutorials.

 

The last step in this introduction to the REV navigation process will be to retrieve a document. Now that you have properly indexed it, all you need to do is hit the binocular button in the navigation menu on the top right to switch to the Search Screen. The first field here is your choice of Repository. Remember how we customized this field earlier by flipping the “multi repo” toggle to turn it on? Well, this is where it comes in handy as it will allow you to search multiple repositories simultaneously.

 

 

If you are in Personal mode, this is a moot point as you’ve only created one repository but, if you are in business mode, you will likely find this feature very handy. From there, simply fill up the fields that you wish to search by and hit the blue “search” button on the top right of that window. If, whilst filling up these search fields, you’ve made a mistake or multiple mistakes and can’t seem to find what you are looking for, simply hit the orange “clear” button and it will wipe all your fields in one click. If you just hit the “search” button without filling up any of the search fields, you will get a complete list of your indexed documents in the selected repository.

 

 

Once your search results have been generated, you can navigate through them using the “previous” and “next” buttons at the bottom of that window. The various columns represent the indexing fields that have been used.

 


You can choose to customize the number of search result rows you wish to display by hitting the downward pointing arrow next to the white field at the bottom of that window, on the right side of the center. You have an option between 5, 10, 20, 25, 50 or 100  search result rows.




The “update search” button on the top right corner of that result window will take you right back to the search screen. Therefore, you can go back and forth like this and fine-tune your search terms, until you find exactly what you are looking for.

 

So that’s the essence of REV at a glance. Obviously, as you can imagine, there are a lot more tweaks and tricks to customize your REV experience according to your specific needs. But for now, you are fully equipped to navigate REV and start indexing documents.