I have been trying to pay attention the last few weeks to how much I open Microsoft Office/NeoOffice/OpenOffice/iWork. I have been really amazed that it’s not much. I think part of this is because most of what I do these days involves pure text and Word documents and such just get in the way of that. I am really surprised how much I don’t deal with them anymore.

Now granted, I’m not a project controller any longer who stares at Microsoft Excel 14 hours a day. However, i am rather amused by how much I’m not using them. I all of those products I own and have installed. I won’t say I enjoy them as I don’t use them as much as I used to. I had a lot of fun building some pretty major tools in Excel when I was a project controller. But I haven’t had the need to do that in more than a year. I almost wish someone would give me something to do in Excel just so I can keep my skills up, but the fact is, I just don’t have the need to do it any longer. I spend my time in XHTML and CSS and trying to focus on Ruby and MySQL.

I just wonder how much you are using actual, Word Processing and Spreadsheet Programs?

You know, this might panic some people, but to me, it’s just a simple thing of joy. Thanks to the scanner link to the right, which I LOVE, I am making all the paper disappear from my house. It was a beautiful thing this morning. I get to my desk and my wife, who usually gets the mail, had dropped the mail on my desk before she left for the office this morning. So I opened it up and just scanned it right in and threw the original in the trash.

This is just a thing of beauty. To have the paper gone and not cluttering up my life. Now the only step is figuring how to keep it organized in such a way that I can find what I need to find, archive what I don’t and act on what I need to act on. This is going to be a much harder prospect I think. I have tried SOHO Notes which is a really decent way to manage things, however, the program seems to get bogged down when there are a few thousand PDFs in the database. So what I think I’m going to do is find a way to use smart folders with keywords and file names to keep track of what needs to go where.

I’ll keep you posted… Ugh, now that pun was just not funny.

Sorry for the pun, but, well it just had to be done.As you can see on the right there is a new box for EntreCard. This was new to me until Guruofsales pointed it out on his blog today. So I hopped right over and checked it out. Very interesting and new concept for blogging and just other information. I think there is huge possibilities here for the return of the Guest Book. Everyone wants to know who was at your site, but no one wants to fill out a form saying hello. This is quick and painless to say hello.I’m pretty fond of the concept to be sure, let’s see how it goes.