Now and again, I encounter a tool that becomes such a valuable asset that I cannot imagine life before it! My iPod still holds the number one spot, but rapidly moving into second place is my Fujitsu Scansnap S510 Color Image Scanner.

I spotted an article on productivity (can't remember where) and, being a sucker for anything that will help tidy my desk and filing cabinets, I was intrigued by the SnapScan's sparkling review.

The reviewer promised that the scanner would rapidly scan papers, permit you to store the images, and then use the OCR (optical character recognition) function to search for the document(s) using keywords from the pages themselves.

Two day's later, thanks to my Amazon Prime membership, my new toy appeared on my doorstep. It took all of 20 minutes to install the scanner and software, and get it running, and the results astounded me. This little machine, the size of a large bread loaf, speedily ingested the sheets I fed it, scanning in color both sides simultaneously, and spitting out images on my computer ready for filing in "cabinets". Soon I had labeled folders in cabinets for my medical license paperwork, all my insurance documentation, agreements, and receipts, and I was just getting started!

What tickled me even more was remembering that there was a CardMinder function. I popped a business card into the feeder, selected CardMinder from "Programs" and pushed the scanner button. A quick throughput later, the two-sided business card image popped up on my screen with matching data fields below, populated with the company name, person's name, phone number and email address. One click on "add to Microsoft Outlook" and the contact information magically migrate to my in Contacts (there are a few prompts do deal with).

You can name and then convert your documents to PDFs, Word, PowerPoint or Excel (each document is assigned a rather obscure name consisting of numbers and dashes). The machine comes equipped with Adobe Acrobat 8 Standard, which then allows you to delete pages, rotate, and attach to email.

A demo video speaks a thousand words - check it out here if you are interested.

A few weeks later, I took a leap of faith (I do back up my computer every night onto a separate hard drive, which I highly recommend!) and put my paper shredder to work. It wasn't long before it was smoking!