Microsoft has released the trial version of MS Office 2010 in its website. Within 15 days of its release more than a million people have downloaded the trial version. Microsoft has announced that it is proud of the interest Office 2010 has generated.  MS Office 2010 will be available commercially in June 2010.

Microsoft will market this in 6 editions. Starter, Home and Student, Home and Business, Standard, professional and Professional Plus. One of the editions will be a free edition which consists of simplified version of Word and Excel and will contain advertisements. So far there is no indication of how much MS Office 2010 will cost.

If you are interested in downloading the trial version of 2010 you can download from http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/default.aspx

• Cutting trees to manufacture paper will be reduced. Therefore trees will live longer.
• Since information will be stored in digital form, it will be easier to handle information. You can search and find information faster and easier.
• You can save space by storing information digitally rather than in paper
• Paper can be lost or decayed. Digital information can be backed up and therefore safer.
• Information stored digitally can be easily found and transfered and shared between different people.

No doubt the digital form is better than the paper form. But many have the following questions and doubts while shifting from paper to digital form.

• Is it too expensive to convert to digital form
• Is it enough to have digital form of all current and future information while maintaining the old existing information in paper
• The digital files are stored in a hard disk. what if the hard disk is corrupted. Will all the information be lost?

All these doubts are unnecessary. It is not expensive to convert data to digital format. It is always better to convert all the data including old and existing to digital format. The price of a hard disk is cheap. Therefore you can backup the contents of one disk to another disk. You can also backup data in CDR and DVD disks. You can use RAID technology to backup data using multiple hard disks. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Devices.

What you need, to convert to digital format?

1. A high end, fast computer with a good scanner is required.
2. If you do not want to save the scanned documents as images and you want to convert them to text then you need a software called OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Usually the OCR software comes free with the scanner. If you have many paper documents that needs to be converted to text then you can buy an OCR software such as ABBYY Fine Reader.
3. To backup the your digital data you need quality software that has Scheduler facility. With the scheduler facility the software specific files at specified intervals automatically without your intervention. You can use ‘Second Copy’, ‘Win Backup’ or any other backup software.
4. The next this you need is the ‘Document Management Software’. New Soft’s Presto1 Page Manager is one such software. Some scanners come with this software freely.