What’s in My Electronic Toolbox?
By Jim Calloway, Director, OBA Management Assistance Program

What’s in your electronic toolbox? Is your computer workstation pretty much as it came from the factory or are you one of those people who customizes a lot of different things on your PC and adds many utility programs?

Recently, after spending some time at home drafting some papers and articles over the weekend, I experienced a great horror. Monday morning my computer hard drive crashed leaving me staring at the infamous Blue Screen of Death. I’m usually pretty good on backup but I hadn’t bothered to copy any of the weekend’s work at home over onto a flash drive or e-mail it into the office. Because I had several projects that I had to push forward on Monday, I could not take too much time to mourn over the dead hard drive. I borrowed another laptop from the OBA CLE department and started to work.

The rest of that day and the next was an interesting experience for me. Since this was only a computer temporarily in my possession, I was not interested in customizing or installing utilities on the computer. I just needed to get some things done so I could then see if a data recovery from my laptop was possible.

It turned out that this was quite an interesting (and frustrating) exercise in rediscovering all of the customizations and utilities that I normally used and missed when using a “straight from the factory” computer. And thus was born the idea for this column.

I expect some of you already use some or all of these tools.

So what do I use every day that I might have started to take for granted?

Desktop Search

I’ve written before about the benefits of having all of your documents and e-mails indexed by a desktop search engine. I’ve now learned that there is a detriment to this as well. You can become dependent on being able to quickly search through hundreds of documents or hundreds of e-mails with a full text search tool. I was still able to find most documents when I needed them. I use long descriptive filenames and sort them into appropriate folders. Generally sorting a list of documents by the date will help you get pretty close to locating the correct document. E-mail is a bit more problematic, especially when you decide to look for one in deep storage and don’t know if it is one or two years old.

Nevertheless the point is that desktop search is a lot quicker than manually trying to locate any document more than a few months old. I think it may be a little easier for lawyers who organize their electronic documents into client folders.

I use X1, available from X1.com. A similar utility is called Copernic, available free from copernic.com. I prefer not to use the desktop search tools from Yahoo or Google. I just like the independent applications at this point. Reports on the desktop search tool contained in Vista are very positive. In fact it is one of the few aspects of Vista that most everyone comments favorably about.

Speech Recognition Software

As many of you are aware, I am a big fan of DragonDictate NaturallySpeaking speech recognition software. Of course it was not installed on the temporary computer and so I found myself having to keyboard a bit more than usual, which was not a productivity increase. The current version of this software is version 9. I do not have any inside information but I assume that version 10 will be out sometime in 2008. I tend to only use DragonDictate when I am drafting rather long projects. So I don’t use it as much with e-mail as drafting CLE papers and these articles for the Oklahoma Bar Journal. Nevertheless it was an important tool missing from my electronic toolbox.

I will note that readers who are very fast and accurate typists will probably not find a significant benefit from this program.

My original article on speech recognition software is ‘Computer, Can You Hear Me Now?’ One Lawyer’s Surprisingly Positive Experience with Speech Recognition Software.1

Adobe Acrobat Professional

One of the tools that I really missed was Adobe Acrobat Professional. The temporary computer did come with the Adobe reader, of course. I’m trying to follow my own advice and send documents out as PDF files rather than Word or WordPerfect files unless the recipient needs to edit the file. One of the big benefits of having Adobe Acrobat Professional in my job is to save and archive useful material. I’ve set up a folder on my computer called My Library and I save lots of interesting material to it, including the complete contents of CDs from technology conferences and CLE programs when the materials come in digital format. I use Adobe Acrobat Professional on almost a daily basis to save detailed e-mails from colleagues that I might want to refer to in the future and archival copies of Web sites or blogs with useful information to the My Library folder.

Printing to a PDF file from all of these sources is a snap with Adobe Acrobat Professional. Of particular interest to lawyers is a feature of Adobe Acrobat Professional that allows you to print an entire Outlook folder filled with dozens of e-mails on one particular client file or matter to the single PDF file. I find that many lawyers want to keep e-mails on a matter in an Outlook folder while the matter is active, but then use this method to archive all of the e-mails to a single PDF file when the file is closed.

Custom Toolbars

As many of you are aware, customized toolbars in various applications are very useful if you frequently do an operation that is not available from the standard toolbar. While I do not heavily customize the toolbars, I did quickly note that there were a few differences in the standard toolbars on the temporary computer.

Most of us (including me) would benefit from spending an hour or so adding buttons to a toolbar for operations that we do frequently and removing those that we would likely never do. If you’ve never done this before, you should definitely click on the View - Toolbars just to see the impressive number of specialized toolbars that you can make visible with a single click.

Parenthetically, I have to note that one of the best toolbar customization tips I’ve ever heard was to customize the Outlook toolbar so that the Reply All button was on the opposite side of the toolbar from the Reply button. We’ve all noted the potentially embarrassing consequences that can occur when one clicks Reply All when they meant to click Reply. So separating those two buttons is a very good idea.

Anagram

Anytime there is a technology program on favorite utility programs, Anagram is always mentioned. It is available at www.getanagram.com. If you use Outlook or GroupWise and have not given this program a try, I would strongly encourage you to make use of the 45 day free trial.

What this utility does is capture the signature blocks from e-mails, Web sites, pleadings or any other digital document you have displayed on your computer and places the contents into Outlook contact card. This might not sound like a big deal at first glance, but unless you are an extremely well-organized individual, most of your Outlook contact cards are not completely filled in and only have a name and an e-mail address or maybe a phone number. By using Anagram you can fill in complete addresses, corporate titles, fax numbers and a whole host of information into an Outlook contact card automatically. You never can tell when it will be handy to have this information in Outlook. If you synchronize Outlook with your mobile phone, you may find that you have a lot of information in your mobile phone that you didn’t have before.

As noted previously, there’s a 45 day free trial of this program so if you are an Outlook or GroupWise user, what do you have to lose? I will warn you that most attorneys to actually use Anagram during the 45 day trial end up paying a rather modest purchase price of $29.95 to own it afterwards.

Outlook AutoComplete

AutoComplete is the feature of Outlook that offers to complete an address for you in the To: line of an e-mail as you are typing one in. You can just hit enter to insert the suggested e-mail address. My colleague Ross Kodner of Microlaw.com says that AutoComplete in Outlook is so potentially dangerous that you should disable it. The danger is that while working quickly you will send that confidential e-mail to Mary Smith, the opposing counsel on that case, when you are trying to send it to Mary Schwatz, your co-counsel. This is certainly a legitimate concern.

One would assume it is taking these names from your Outlook contacts but that is not exactly true. It comes from a “nicknames” database. So if you change someone’s e-mail address in your Outlook contacts, AutoComplete will still be sending it to the old e-mail address.

But I don’t send out very many confidential e-mails and I do like AutoComplete. You can minimize the danger by verifying the recipient every time before you hit Send. You can also easily prune the dangerous names out of AutoComplete by looking at the drop-down list presented by AutoComplete. You use the arrow key to move down to select an entry and then the delete key to remove them from the nicknames database.

On the other hand, disabling AutoComplete may be the smart thing to do. I’m just noting I missed it.

The links bar in my Internet Explorer Browser

One of the customizations that I always recommend lawyers make is to fill the links bar in their browsers with their most frequently visited Web sites. This is very simple. You just go to View -Toolbars in Internet Explorer, unlock the toolbars, drag it down where it is visible if it is not and lock the toolbars again. Then you visit your most frequently used sites and drag the icon in the address bar down to the links bar.

The default mime for some of the sites will be quite long so I always recommend right clicking on the name that reunites me with a very short name or abbreviation. I have my 12 most frequently visited sites all visible on my links bar, which means I can navigate to them with a single click. This sounds complicated but is actually very easy and a big timesaver.

Autotext/Autocorrect in Microsoft Word and Quickwords/QuickCorrect in WordPerfect

These are two similar functions that allow you to insert a large block of preformatted text by only typing a few characters. I’m already over my allocated space this month, so I’ll just direct you to the help files of your browser.

But generally speaking, you just type the text, highlight it and save it under one of these two functions with a nonsense name that you won’t be typing for any other reason.

The bottom line is you can then type “words” like IOAD, which will expand to:IT IS THEREFORE ORDERED ADJUDGED AND DECREED. This is a real timesaver, especially when you use it to automatically insert several paragraphs.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this walk through some utilities and customizations. I will note that most of these are very inexpensive or just require a commitment of your time to set them up.

By the way, it turned out that when I finally got back to the old laptop that I used for the last four years, I able to get it up and running again by using the CHKDSK repair feature of the original Windows CDs that came with it. I was pleased. Given the error message I was receiving on the Blue Screen of Death, the odds on that actually working were probably about like betting a non-suited two and seven for your hole cards in Texas hold ‘em and hitting a full house on the flop.

So for me the story clearly has a happy ending. I got an inspiration for this story idea for this February Oklahoma Bar Journal. I recovered the one I had half written which I can now use for the April Oklahoma Bar Journal. And in the March Oklahoma Bar Journal I will talk about the OBA Solo and Small Firm Conference which is scheduled for June 19-21, 2008 at Tanglewood Resort.

1. www.okbar.org/members/map/articles/2006/090206.htm

See also, Jim Calloway, “Computer, Can You Hear Me Now?’ One Lawyer’s Surprisingly Positive Experience with Speech Recognition Software,” 77 Oklahoma Bar Journal 2485,2489 (Sept. 2, 2006)

Originally published in the Oklahoma Bar Journal February 9, 2008 - Vol. 79; No.4.