Many of us have filing cabinets full of paper we’d either rather not have to store, or experienced times when we’re unable to find a particular document when we want it. What are some of the ways that we can save paper & reduce the clutter in our lives?
Saving documents electronically can be a great solution. However, we need to make sure that we can still open them at some unspecified future date. Most of the Microsoft products such as Word or Excel, are fairly “industry standard” & create files that can usually be opened by later versions.
However, the most elegant solution is to archive your information using pdf (portable document format). It has become industry standard for archiving & distributing electronic documents, it has a reader that is widely distributed for free & it is guaranteed to be around for many years to come. There are a number of pdf creation tools available, some even for free, that vary in ease of use, functionality, & quality of output. The most popular & powerful pdf creation tool is Adobe Acrobat. Adobe are the creators of the pdf format & offer generous discount to charities.