I'm not surprised an HP executive called the paperless office a fallacy – why would the world's largest computer printer maker say otherwise.

HP senior vice president Bruce Dahlgren says: "It's unrealistic to think that printing is just going to go away".

Computerworld Australia reports him saying: " the way people print and copy is changing." Dahlgren says people are printing more documents but fewer pages. They take more care about what gets printed.

I do the same.

Since starting my paperless journalist project I've managed to cut the number of printed pages by more than 60%, but zero remains a long way off.

I rarely print incoming documents for reading. But I still need to proof-read on paper – especially when I write important or longer pieces.

There's no question I catch more errors in my work when proof-reading paper documents. I'm not alone. Online reading is tiring and online proofing is less accurate.

If James Bond were a journalist and not a spy, Q would give him a Livescribe Pulse Smartpen.

It’s a larger than average ball-point pen with a built-in microphone and digital audio recorder. This allows you to record audio while taking notes.

A audio recorder built-in to a pen makes it ideal for interviewing people. But it gets better.

The Pulse Smartpen also records handwritten notes and links them to the audio. This allows you to set bookmarks, so you can recall passages of audio instantly by tapping the pen.

And it connects to a PC to back-up your audio and handwritten notes – where you can use the files with conventional software.

It sounds magical. And in practice it feels like it. I used the pen to conduct a couple of interviews and can report it delivers on its promise.

Prices start at around US$150.

Livescribe Pulse Smartpen does journalism

I love how the pen doesn’t get in the way of an interview. People happily talk to a not scribbling journalist – it’s another thing entirely when you shove a microphone in their face.

The sound quality is surprisingly good. One interview took place in a noisy room – yet the Smartpen picked up my questions and the interviewee’s answers without a lot of the background noise.

It was less successful when I did a trial run in a busy cafe. In a quiet room it is amazing. There’s an external headphone and microphone packaged with the pen. Livescribe says this gives better quality recordings but I didn’t use it as it would be off-putting for interviewees.

In practice I found it hard to remember to set bookmarks in mid interview. After a couple of pages of notes I set bookmarks at the top of each page – this made it easier to navigate when I went back over the interview.

It’s not paperless

The Livescribe Pulse Smartpen only takes me part way on my paperless journalist quest– but it does cut the amount of paper I need to store.

When you write with the pen, it puts ink on a page in the conventional way. But to get the best results you have to use the pen with special notepaper – called Dot Paper – which is more expensive than normal paper and only available from Lightscribe.

Dot Paper has the buttons needed to control the pen printed on each page – which means you don’t need to struggle with controls on the pen itself.

You can download you your digital handwritten notes to your computer. Which means you don’t need to keep notebooks once they are full.

Negatives

Dot Paper notebooks are expensive and they are not widely available here in New Zealand – as a journalist I can see myself quickly running out of the special paper. Thankfully you can print out more paper using your own printer if you need some in a hurry – but this is even more expensive than the official paper.

The pen also uses special ball-point ink cartridges – these are only small and at a guess I’d say they probably don’t last as long as normal ball-points.

Positives

One surprising plus was the relatively long battery life, I found the pen works for days without needing a recharge. Also the 2GB of Ram is plenty, I haven’t come close to running out of space.

The pen docks into a USB cradle and downloads data quickly to a PC – usually it just takes seconds. The Windows software bundled with the Smartpen is better than I expected and the small lcd display on the pen is excellent.

Pushing the envelope

The basic Livescribe Pulse Smartpen stores notes as images. Handwriting recognition isn’t included in the standard package, but a $40 add-on from Vision Objects does the job. I’ll be testing this shortly.

I’ve tried feeding the audio from the Smartpen to Nuance’s Dragon Dictate voice recognition software with little success. I’d be interested to hear from anyone else attempting this.

Moving from paper to paperless document management, I've learnt:

Use meaningful file names

Windows allows file names of up to 256 characters. Give documents meaningful names fully describing their contents. Add keywords if you think this will help.

Property fields

If you store Microsoft Word documents, use the property fields. You can get to these in Word 2007 by clicking the Microsoft Office Button , selecting Prepare and then Properties.

Date information is stored automatically when you create or save a document.

Use document folders

Some say modern PC search tools mean folders are no longer important. I disagree – sometimes you need an overview of related files.

Organise your documents into folders with relevant folder names. If it helps, nest them in sub folders. Use the same folder names to organise your email and browser favourites. I also use the same names for tagging.

Use email rules to automatically route messages to the right folder. Pretty soon you’ll develop a routine of always storing documents in the right place and you’ll know where to find things.

Master desktop search

Learn how to use your computer’s search tools. Windows, Mac OS and Linux all have good tools as standard.

If you move away from built-in search, the best tools for your needs depend on the applications you use. Some swear by alternatives such as Google Desktop Search and Copernic.

Google Desktop Search is bloated and slow, but adds your Gmail files to the database. Copernic is a good alternative and searches just about every file type you'll encounter. It doesn't search Gmail and it’s not at its best when used with Vista and Outlook.

Microsoft Outlook

I no longer use Microsoft Outlook for day-to-day email, but the applications is a great document management tool. You can search for and view document files as well as email messages. Remember emails are often also important documents.

Additional keywords

Use a document’s properties to store extra keyword information and comments. This is particularly useful if you have scanned documents stored as an image.

Nuance’s PaperPort is it for paperless document management on home computers.

Perhaps there are alternatives, I haven’t seen one. I use PaperPort 11, but a newer version, Paperport 12, is available.

Paperport handles many document formats and sizes. It often comes bundled with scanners – and is designed to work with them.

Paperport sits on top of Windows’ folder structure. You view document thumbnails laid out on the screen. Usually Paperport’s display shows the first page of multiple-page documents, but unlike Windows, you can scroll through the pages without opening the thumbnail.

You can store documents in several formats – Paperport recognises all the common ones. But changing formats and using Paperport documents is straightforward.

Paperport automatically generates a row of application icons along the bottom of its display based on the programs installed on your computer. On my computer the icons include the main Microsoft Office applications along with Ominpage, Photoshop, Acrobat, FTP and others.

When you move a document thumbnail on one of these icons, the application opens allowing you to word on the document. For example, moving a PDF to the Outlook icon allows you to email the document and moving, say, a Tiff document to the Omnipage icon cranks up its optical character recognition engine.

These days it makes sense to store most electronic documents as PDFs – the format is the widely accepted paperless standard. Paperport comes with a built-in PDF conversion utility which does the job smoothly and efficiently – generally there’s little need for human intervention.

If you’ve a huge amount of documents to scan, it’s possible to let Paperport automatically improve images. It can straighten them and adjust colour and contrast, sharpen and remove red-eye from photographs. Even though I’ve scanned a stored more than 1,000 documents I’ve avoided this automation because it can introduce errors. Instead I tweak images manually as I enter them.

The bad stuff: I’ve found the program buggy – it crashes without warning. Yet it never loses a huge amount of work when this happens. In addition, there’s an annoying registration reminder application loaded on to your computer – which can cause problems with Windows. It takes a while to learn how to get the best out of the application.

Another gripe is poor support – the Nuance web site has few answers to the problems I saw and there’s not a vibrant and vocal community of users to call on when in need of help.

Overall: As far as I know, there’s not low-level alternative to Paperport, so if you need paperless home document management this is it. The application does what I need, is a productivity booster and is a powerful tool despite its annoyances.

It's a week since I completed my first paperless GST return using Xero. It took about a day. That's only slightly less than it took with Quickbooks. Yet considering I'm using an unfamiliar system, it represents real progress.

Xero isn't hard to learn. My problems are more to do with accounting than with the software – I wonder if I will ever really understand double entry book-keeping?

Setting up Xero is easy. Importing bank account data is a breeze. Reconciling accounts is fast. And Xero learns about my accounts as I enter data, so it will get faster.

And that's what I was hoping.

Xero isn't cheap compared with packaged accounting software. But at NZ$50 a month, I'm in front if I save just one hour. I'm well on target. Which means I'm likely to make the full commitment and switch over by the time my next GST return is due.

Bank permission form

One hiccup was the bank permission form I needed to download, sign and then send, before Westpac would allow Xero automatic access to my account information. Finding an envelope wasn't easy in a paperless office. Thankfully Xero uses Freepost so I didn't need to search for a stamp. But I still managed to leave the letter sitting on my desk for a few days before posting.

This isn't about paperless journalism, it is relevant to my paperless journalism project.

Last Monday I went to see Pavement at the Auckland Town Hall. Although the sound was shaky at first, it was an excellent night out.

The night was almost spoilt by the quaintly old-fashioned internet ticketing system used for events at Auckland Town Hall.

I ordered tickets on-line through the Edge web site. It's not the world's best e-commerce system, but that's not my gripe.

A few days later I found an undelivered parcel card from a courier in my letter box. The card was timed and dated – a time when I was definitely at home. In fact another courier package delivered by the same company arrived 30 minutes before the time on the card.

Stupidly I assumed this was just a mix-up and left the matter. A few days later the Pavement tickets hadn't arrived. When I called, the Edge told me they had been couriered. The courier company told me to pick up the tickets from its depot – a ninety minute trip across the city.

It was much harder than buying tickets in person at the box office. And that's just wrong.

And, am I the only person who thinks sending couriers around town with tickets in tiny envelopes is a grossly inefficient use of resources?

Can't we come up with something better, more reliable, paperless?

My paperless journalism project ground to a halt this morning.

I've switched to Xero's online accounting software. Xero needs authorisation to access my bank account. This means downloading a PDF, printing it,  filling in the form, signing it and sending to Xero.

The process went smoothly until the last stage. There were no envelopes in my paperless office. I had to make a trip to the local Post Shop and buy more paper.

Damn.

I never planned going completely paperless when I set out to reduce the amount of paper I use as a freelance journalist.

But I thought I might get away without using paper business cards.

After three months working part-time as the New Zealand editor for Communications Day, it's clear I need business cards – too many people have asked me for one.

So, what could I do in the business card line that would cut my paper usage?

I found an answer with Moo MiniCards. At 28 by 70 mm they are half the size of conventional business cards – which means they use less paper.

My cards have images from the Science Museum in London printed on one side – which is right for my work as I mainly write about technology and business. My contact details on the other side of the card. The cards come in a neat little box and took nine days to arrive.

As it was my first purchase, I only bought 100 cards for US$19.99 plus another $13 for shipping. At a total of $US32.99 for 100 cards – about NZ$40 – they were expensive. The same money could have bought many more cards from a New Zealand printer, but I haven't seen the half-size cards on offer locally.

What's more, the Science Museum images and the small size give me something to talk about when I hand out a card.