Even in these technologically advanced times the paperless office seems as far away as it did ten years ago, sure more and more data is stored on disk but the amount of data has increased in proportion, plus many items of everyday business activity are still paper based. Who would have said that in 2004 the fax machine would still be alive and in every office? PC's have been able to fax for 15 years now, that's without the range of fax to email services!

It seems that old habits die hard and so it is with business cards, sure I have an electronic card and have even sent SMS cards and tried that new Olympic sport of "sending via IrDA" ahhh the hours of fun to be had aligning 2 devices.

Will I therefore give in to the card, will I hell! Instead I have got my paws on a business card reader from Targus, this is in effect a mini scanner that will optically read the card placed in it and pass that to software included in the package to interpret the data.

The Targus scanner is one of the smallest this is important when you have a desk as cluttered as mine, the scanner's resolution is 600x1200 dpi which is ample for this task, the bundled OCR software (optical character recognition) is quite good and handles even the poorest cards although I have defeated it with a couple of colourful ones.

Once the software has acquired the card it presents the data on screen for you to check it has matched the right fields, name, phone, email, company name etc it also stores a small image of the card as scanned for reference. Then a single menu operation will synchronise the card database with MS outlook and a number of other packages including lotus notes, also the scanner will directly interface to a PDA of your choice.

The connection to your PC is via USB, which is also where the scanner derives its power cutting back on the number of power adaptors living under the desk! In our tests the Targus performed well reading 17/20 cards with minimal editing and 19 after a re scan, the one that fails looks like something made in a motorway service station by a blind man wearing a sack so we won't lose sleep over that one.

All round this really is a neat way to get business contacts into MS outlook and we can recommend it as the first step to the paperless office which is due in 2026.

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