Spartacus of Acrobat

Crikey, people read my blog!!

Rowan has asked me to expand on why I don't overly subscribe to the paperless office theory.

Well, I guess my thoughts are based around the behaviour of people. Let me say first, that as an Acrobat evangelist, I do believe that through use of Acrobat and the free Adobe Reader we can enable many many documents to live in electronic form only.

Indeed, I would clearly also prefer this method of working because of the many inherent advantages of using electronic documents. I won't bang on about them now because, to an extent, that's what this whole Blog is about.... but basically I'm a big fan.

But back to paper and why people still want it. I've often started seminars and presentations about Acrobat stating that I'm still a fan of paper, mainly to surprise the audience but I do follow up with reasons...

1. Paper is highly transportable, with the caveat that I'm not talking about a 5000 page Airbus maintenance manual. For many purposes it's a compact way of carrying data.
2. Paper doesn't need power, an operating system, or a device to work
3. You were taught how to use paper documents when you were 3, or 4 or 5 .. well you get the point.
4. When I send you a paper document, I'm confident that it will arive in the same format I sent it, the pagination won't have changed, font's will be correct, images won't be lost etc..

So, it's ubiquitous, transportable, has low usage requirements and we all know how to work it. I often state that "any electronic system you create to share information must be AT LEAST as good as a bit of paper"

(by the way, I believe Acrobat and PDF match my exacting criteria)

Oh yes, the behaviour of people, I've watched people in offices, both for my work and in my hobby of stalking... (too much information?)

Anyway, pretty much everywhere I go, I still see people printing documents, why do they do this? Mainly it seems so that they can sit down and read through them. Often this is accompanied by changing the environment the person is working in, you know, move to a comfy chair, change lighting etc. So I think there's a real comfort factor to be had in reading paper based documents and a mind/mood change that can accompany working with paper.

I've also tried a number of different devices eBook readers etc, Laptops, Tablet PC's, handheld devices and I have to say, whilst comfortably being a child of the computer age, I still find them less comfortable to use for longer periods than paper.

Finally, I also consider the many different sizes and formats of documents. Whilst Acrobat can support documents of almost any size (a maximum document size measured in square metres) the devices we view them on impose constraints that mean we have to zoom and pan for very large page sizes. I see this a lot in the Architecture / Construction space.

Well, that was all a bit of a ramble, but I hope it made some sense. What I think I'm trying to say is that I believe in striving to minimise the use of paper, but I do believe that we will probably never reach a position where paper is eliminated from our workplaces.

Let me know what you think.