Filed 7 September, 1995 for publication September 14, 1995
800 Words
By Jason Romney
Tomorrow your correspondent jets to Paris for the International Bar Association's 12th Biennial Business Law Congress, a talkfest which brings together hundreds of lawyers from across the world. This year's hot topic is the law of the Internet - a fast growing area for lawyers interested in multimedia and on-line services.
The idea of so many lawyers in one place probably reminds you of acerbic jokes involving the bottom of the ocean and sundry other ways of dealing with the legal profession. The low esteem with which the public regards attorneys may account in part for how hard lawyers strive to endear themselves to people - even to the extent of handing out dozens of business cards to their own kind at conferences.
At the last IBA congress I came away with no less than 50 business cards which is more than I usually acquire even at computer conventions.
Now, all Road Warriors know the value of contact information - but also how hard it is to keep track of business cards. You (or your personal assistant) might keyboard the information into a good contact management database such as Tracker, but this often only occurs when you return from a trip because there is never enough time to enter the information into your computer while on the road.
For this year's IBA I'll be packing one of the most elegant and powerful solutions to this, and many other Road Warrior challenges: a PaperPort. This 2.5 pound wonder, available for Windows or the Macintosh, plugs into the com port of your notebook and scans paper - from a business card to an A4 page - straight onto a virtual desktop on your computer screen.
At 6 seconds per business card, you can scan in 50 cards in five minutes. There is no on/off switch - the PaperPort is `paper driven', activating automatically when it detects paper at its mouth.
The PaperPort software is automatically fired up after a scan and lets you view the scanned paper either as a thumbnail (in `Desktop View') or as a single page (in `Page View'). You can also import .bmp and .tif files to the desktop (or export your scans, also in a range of formats). You can even choose the PaperPort Desktop as your Windows printer driver and print directly onto the Desktop from any Windows application.
At the bottom of the PaperPort screen you'll find a series of icons (exactly which ones depends on which software is already installed on your computer). By dragging a thumbnail of any scanned object to the appropriate icon, you can instantly fax, e-mail or print it.
The built-in Calera optical character recognition means you can drag an A4 page to the icon of your word processor and have the page converted into editable text in say, Microsoft Word, within seconds. Scanned paper can be arranged into stacks of up to 2500 documents and an entire stack faxed, e-mailed or OCRd automatically.
I bought PaperPort in America for $US359.00 (00 11 1 880 289 7939) plus $US61 delivery and some duty at this end. It's a not inconsiderable investment but eminently worthwhile. Scans can be made at up to 400dpi and, although color is not available, even the faintest business card will come up readably with a little magnification. It also works extremely well for newspaper articles.
Scans can be given names of up to 30 characters and arranged into folders with similarly long filenames. Scan names (which you do need to keyboard) can be retrieved with a powerful built-in search engine which will locate information such as the item name, keywords and specific words or phrases in annotations.
The PaperPort software lets you annotate documents with notes, highlight text or draw lines, arrows and circles around the page.
Of course, while the PaperPort software can accommodate up to 100 folders (each one of which can contain up to 100 scanned items), this requires a reasonable amount of hard disk space. An average A4 letter takes 30.8K at 200dpi and 62K at 400 dpi. That means that as you get addicted to PaperPort you'll probably need considerable hard disk space...
Warriors wanting to go on-line simultaneously will also need to invest in a PCMCIA card modem because most notebooks only have one com port.
Happily I can say that PaperPort seems to work fine with both Windows 3.1 AND Windows 95 - although in rare instances, it may conflict with certain drivers already present on your system which will need to be disabled.
If there's one thing lawyers (and tax agents) love, its a good paper trail. With PaperPort you can turn a trail into an eight lane superhighway...
* Jason Romney is a solicitor and information systems consultant at Price Brent's Information Media and Communication Group. E-mail: jromney@werple.mira.net.au
ENDS