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I’d like to share some of the "geek" tools I use to run my business. Like most businesspeople, I have to keep on top of things in my industry or be left in the dust. I’m always looking for things that help me do my job faster and easier. Here’s a rundown on some of them.

My favorite tool at the moment is my Palm III. A Christmas gift from several friends, it has become indispensable. This is my second Palm product. I bought the first to replace the bulky Franklin planner I carried for years. I was excited by the opportunity to "replicate" or back up all of the data to my computer, so if I lost my planner, I had an exact duplicate of the information on my notebook.

It is much more than a paper planner replacement. I can set alarms to remind me of appointments, quickly view a week, month, or even a year of meetings without having to copy the information to three or more places in my paper planner. The to-do list feature allows me to keep a personal list as well as my business items. I’m more organized than I’ve ever been in my life, and I don’t have a pocket full of pieces of paper anymore. I also have every phone number that is important to me on the Palm III, now totaling more than 200.

Although I’ve barely scratched the surface of the things you can do with a Palm, I suggest you try one, as most stores have working demos (or you can ask me for a demo). There are some Windows CE competitors with more features or even a color screen, but they don’t have the battery life or software to go with them. This is one fight I hope Microsoft loses.

As useful as my Palm III is, I can’t use the simple e-mail program on it for daily business, so I carry a notebook until something smaller comes along. I do the majority of my business on e-mail, and I’ve just changed from Eudora, which I loved, to Microsoft Outlook 2000. I miss Eudora, but I’ve been able to do most of the things I did in Eudora, and Outlook comes free with Office 2000. Plus, it’s a bit more polished a program than Eudora, and it is more integrated with Word and Excel, which I use daily. My only beef with Outlook is that it’s sometimes slow on my aging notebook.

Microsoft Office 2000 is another software tool I can’t live without. Word 2000 is a great program, full of excellent features, and can be configured to suit the way I work. Everyone I deal with, from our lawyers to our vendors, use Word. I have been happy with it every since they finally got Word 6 to work right. Excel is next on my list, as it makes it easy for me evaluate a sale or financial information in many different ways. If I can’t see it on the spreadsheet, a chart will usually make things easier to understand. I use Access only occasionally since the Palm is where I store my databases, but it’s great for converting data between formats. PowerPoint has virtually eliminated the competition, and justifiably so. It is easy to create a professional-looking presentation that you can even put on the Web for anyone to see.

FrontPage 2000 is the tool I use to create all of my Web pages. It is not without fault, since it has a tendency to make mistakes when adding images, but those are quickly fixed. It can handle the toughest designs I throw at it, but it also enables me to put a simple page together in minutes. PhotoShop, although expensive, is the best program for creating, viewing and manipulating images. Tough to learn, but worth the effort, it gives you the power to fix photographs or compress images for the Internet. WS FTP also deserves a mention-–it’s the copy command of the Internet. This is an excellent program that makes it easy for me to move files around the Internet.

I use several computers during the day. My notebook is my e-mail machine, which I use to communicate with family, friends, and business associates. And I use a really old Compaq LTE 5280 for e-mail and word-processing, and maybe a bit of Web surfing. It’s convenient but a bit slow running the latest software. This will be upgraded very soon (as it’s starting to drive me crazy). My notebook makes it easy for me to stay informed from home or while I’m traveling.

At work I use a PC Warehouse Pentium 450 with a Creative Labs Banshee graphics card. This card is great for 3D rendering, surfing the Web, working with graphics, or even just using Word. We have a high-speed connection to the Internet, so I can even watch live video on my work machine. The speed of the computer does make a difference because I tend to do many things at once, and it makes me more productive when I’m not waiting for the computer.

At home I use an aging Pentium 233 MMX that I built. I added a Monster Fusion graphics card, so it’s respectable for most of the other projects I have. By using the AGP bus, graphics are much faster than on a comparable PCI graphics card. With the Fusion card, it can even run the game Half-Life at a decent clip, which is a great test for any computer. The Fusion card can play full-screen video without hesitating, so I sometimes watch movies while I’m working on another computer. Having a second computer is great when you’re doing two things at once or when one machine is out of commission. I have a couple of old Macintosh computers and enjoy using them even though they’re ancient by computer standards. Rounding out my home office is a Panasonic laser printer, slow but quiet.

I’ve owned a Zip drive since they started making them. I bought the parallel-port edition to use as a backup device for my old notebook, and quickly realized how valuable it was. The typical size of files has grown, but the floppy drive stopped at 1.44 megabytes. Before Zip drives, you had to break up large files into several pieces using a complicated program. With the Zip drive, I can fit up to 100 megabytes on a cartridge, transferring almost anything from work to home or to a customer. They thought of everything: I can plug my parallel port edition into any computer and use it by running a "guest" program, without installing any permanent software on the computer. I just read that they have sold 100 million Zip Cartridges-–a major success.

To keep up on business news, I use the Internet. I read the venerable New York Times daily to keep up on world news, and I also read the Cybertimes section. I check www.news.com and www.wired.com to help keep up on my industry, and www.slashdot.org to follow the Unix news. To stay ahead of my competition, I visit www.companysleuth.com. This site is incredible--I can read all kinds of information about any public company. Companysleuth.com lists company news, stock quotes, and other typical information, but it also lists new domain names, patents, trademarks, and links to several important chat sites. We pay about $100 per year for www.hoovers.com, and it has excellent information about public companies, including detailed financial information. Thirty minutes with these sites, and I’ve got my news for the day.

This is only a sampling of the tools that help me do what I do better. I can’t imagine what business was like before e-mail, word-processing, Palm computers, or laser printers. Although these awesome inventions enable us to work only 20 hours per week, we’re definitely getting more done in the same time. I can’t wait to see what I’ll be carrying in five years. Let me know what geek tools you use in your business. Send your comments to: mikek@demorgan.com.