A Brave New World
With all apologies to Aldous Huxley, the brave new world is in the courtroom. More than ever before, technology is being accepted more in the everyday operations of the courtroom. Policies and procedures are amending as new security protocols are implemented. It’s just like Dorothy said to Toto, “We’re not in Kansas anymore!”
Of late, a visitor to the Judicial Centers and courthouse is reminded to leave your cell phone in the car. Not because an errant ring tone that may escape a purse or pocket. Oh, no. It may be because of the photo taking characteristics featured in many phones. For the first time I was in a line requiring all gentlemen to not only place all coins, packs of gum, keys and watches in a container but also our belt. (More than one hip-hopper was gripping empty belt loops to keep trousers from dipping to half-staff!
Some of the newly installed technology is giving new meaning to access by attorneys. The new Ogle County Judicial Center in Oregon is featuring Wi-Fi Internet access for attorneys at no cost. The ISP cost is borne by Marty Typer the Circuit Court Clerk. He is doing so somewhat in self-defense with the logic that Web access will eliminate requests from counsel asking to plug into his network. Novel concept—pay a little to gain a lot!
DuPage Judicial Center is employing digital recording for court proceedings in courtrooms that heretofore offered no record of transcripts. Even in limited use in the more voluminous court calls attorneys can now look to court automation and a digital record to serve clients.
Cook County Circuit Court Clerk’s Office is making a second application for an AOIC e-filing demonstration project to add to the ever-increasing push for electronic filing and having possible access electronically to court documents.
The Standing Committee on Legal Technology of the ISBA is steadfast and resolute to continue to champion new court automation, electronic case filing and electronic discovery. As part of our mission, we will continue to promote technology in the practice of law and are continuing to explore the legal implications of new hardware and software. Our newsletters will continue to publish articles we think will be helpful to attorneys to work with greater efficiency, higher ethical standards and provide better access to justice.
We always welcome ways to help, even to setting up an e-mail site where questions can be posed and responses given. Inquiries can be addressed to AskColt@isba.org and responses are addressed in the pages of our newsletter or on occasion in the Bar News. So if you are stumped, AskColt.
Adobe System’s ubiquitous Acrobat software comes in three primary versions: the free Reader, the $299 per-license Standard version and the $449 per-license Professional version.
Which version or combination of versions is right for your organization? If you’re a litigator or litigation paralegal, the following article should help you decide. It summarizes the key features for trial team members found in each Acrobat flavor.
Please note that there’s a fourth version of Acrobat called Elements. Elements is intended for sale to large organizations, and is only available in bundles of 100 licenses. Elements can create PDFs but has relatively few of the other features found in Acrobat Standard or Professional. Most large organizations use the Reader, Standard and/or Professional versions of Acrobat, so Elements won’t be discussed herein.
Adobe Reader
Adobe Systems has distributed over 500 million copies of the free Reader version of Acrobat as part of its successful effort to make the PDF format the de facto standard for electronic documents.
Once you’ve read about the features of Acrobat Standard and Professional below, it’s likely you’ll want to purchase one of these versions for selected individuals at your organization. However, the free Reader may be a fine solution for many users—in particular those who won’t need to create or modify PDFs.
Here are the features of Reader that should be of greatest interest to trial team members:
—Viewing & Printing—
As its name suggests, Adobe Reader lets you view and print PDFs others have created.
All versions of Acrobat, including Reader, offer sophisticated printing options with which you may be unfamiliar. One example: Acrobat makes it easy to print multiple document pages on a single sheet of paper, similar to the condensed printing option offered by electronic transcript programs. To print two or more document pages per printed page, set the Page Scaling option on Acrobat’s Print dialog box to Multiple Pages Per Sheet.
—Searching—
Searching is an Acrobat feature that’s critical for trial teams and available in all versions, including Reader. Use Acrobat’s Search feature to hunt through a single PDF or an entire collection of PDFs to locate all instances where a word or phrase appears. You’ll find the Search option on Acrobat’s View menu.
Please note that in order to search PDFs they must contain text in addition to images. PDFs that are created from electronic files such as word-processing documents automatically include text. However, when paper documents are scanned to create PDFs, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) must be performed to add text to the PDFs, thereby making them searchable.
—Full Screen Mode—
All versions of Acrobat, including Reader, offer a Full Screen mode that transforms Acrobat into a simple presentation tool.
You’ll find the Full Screen option on Acrobat’s View menu. Once a document is displayed in Full Screen mode, the arrow keys on your keyboard can be used to navigate through document pages. When you’re done presenting, press the ESC button to exit Full Screen mode.
—Plug-In Support—
Part of what has made Acrobat so successful is its support for “Plug-Ins”—product extensions developed by companies other than Adobe Systems. Plug-Ins are available for Bates numbering, redacting and other common litigation tasks.
Some Plug-Ins require a Standard or Professional version of Acrobat as the actions the Plug-ins perform modify PDFs. However, there are also many Plug-Ins that don’t modify PDFs and can be used with the free Adobe Reader.
I apologize for this self-serving example of a Plug-In for Reader, but it’s one with which I’m very familiar. CaseSoft’s “Send to CaseMap” Plug-In for Acrobat works with all versions of Acrobat, including Reader. This Plug-in lets you cull critical passages from PDFs to instantly create new facts in our CaseMap case analysis program. One click on the fact in CaseMap reopens the PDF and takes you back to the page from which the fact was sent.
Acrobat Standard
Here are the six features in the Standard version of Acrobat that should be of greatest interest to litigators and litigation paralegals:
—PDF Creation & Modification—
The primary feature that makes Acrobat Standard worth $299 is its ability to create and modify PDFs in addition to viewing, printing, and searching them.
—Optical Character Recognition—
Acrobat Standard can perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on PDF files that contain images, but not text. Once OCR text has been added to the PDF, it can be searched for any word or phrase.
You’ll find the Recognize Text Using OCR option on Acrobat’s Document menu.
—Commenting—
Acrobat Standard makes it easy to add annotations to PDF documents using highlighters, sticky notes, call outs and a number of other commenting options.
You’ll find mark up tools and also a special help topic titled “How to Comment & Mark Up” on Acrobat’s Comment menu.
Did you know that Acrobat offers easy ways to review the comments associated with a PDF? Select the Show Comments List option on Acrobat’s Comments menu to display a summary of the mark ups in a PDF. Select the Print with Comment Summary option on Acrobat’s Comments menu to use one of four different methods for printing comments, e.g., Document and Comments with Connector Lines on Single Pages.
—PDFing of E-mail—
Beginning with Acrobat 7, the Standard version makes it a cinch to create PDFs of e-mail in Microsoft Outlook. One click can PDF an entire Outlook folder containing thousands of e-mails.
When you PDF e-mail, all attachments and links can be embedded in the PDF Acrobat creates. The resulting PDF automatically organizes e-mails by message dates, by authors’ names and by subject. Bookmarks are created that make it easy to jump to an e-mail of interest. What a great way to review e-mail before producing it during discovery!
Please note that Acrobat’s e-mail PDFing feature integrates with MS Outlook, not the free MS Outlook Express. That’s not a show-stopper though as e-mail in Outlook Express can be easily moved into Outlook.
—Web Capture—
Acrobat Standard makes it easy to PDF web pages and even entire web sites—a very handy feature given the transient nature of web content.
When Acrobat Standard is installed, an Adobe PDF toolbar is added to your copy of Internet Explorer.
—The Organizer—
A final important tool in Acrobat Standard is the Organizer—a feature that was first introduced in Acrobat 7. The Organizer provides flexible ways of viewing the PDFs on your system. For example, the Organizer lets you view PDFs arranged by history—one click displays the PDFs you opened today, yesterday, in the last week, in the past two weeks, in the last 30 days or even in the past year.
You’ll find the Organizer on Acrobat’s File menu.
Acrobat Professional
Acrobat Professional offers the same features as the Standard version, plus many more. Of the numerous features unique to Acrobat Professional, the following three are particularly useful for trial team members and may well justify spending the extra $150 for a Professional license:
—Batch Operations—
Acrobat Professional supports batch processes, for example, batch printing and batch OCRing.
Batch OCRing is particularly handy when you receive a large number of PDFs that contain the images of discovery documents, but not the associated text. Acrobat Professional can OCR an entire folder of such PDFs in a single operation.
—Indexing—
Acrobat Professional can be used to create an index of the text in PDFs. Indexing PDFs dramatically enhances the speed of searches for words and phrases within them.
Without an index, searching across hundreds or thousands of PDF files can be quite slow. With an index, search results are virtually instantaneous.
—Enabling Commenting by Users of Reader—
A feature of Acrobat Professional, which first became available with Acrobat 7, is the ability to enable commenting by users of the free Adobe Reader.
Normally, Reader users cannot add comments to PDFs or participate in the document review process in any meaningful way. However, Acrobat Professional can be used to create PDFs that will activate commenting capabilities for users of Reader.
Learning More About Acrobat
Let me conclude by offering three ways to learn more about how Adobe Acrobat can be used to enhance your litigation practice:
Thank you for reading “The Three Flavors of Adobe Acrobat.” I’d appreciate any and all feedback on this article. Please write me at gkrehel@casesoft.com.
__________
About the Author: Greg Krehel is CEO of CaseSoft. CaseSoft develops five software tools for trial teams, including CaseMap, its flagship case analysis product. CaseMap features tight integration with Adobe Acrobat and over 15 other litigation support tools. Additional information and full-featured trial versions are available at <www.casesoft.com>.
The tools available to lawyers and standards we are expected to follow are evolving. This article presents an overview of the trends in legal technology, many of which are the result of several larger developments.
Electronic Discovery
First, electronic discovery is probably the biggest and most pressing challenge on the radar screen. Many litigators have not looked at the radar screen to see it rapidly approaching, but it is there nonetheless. The bellwether case, or rather series of cases, are the opinions written by Judge Shira Scheindlin in the Southern District of New York in the Zubulake v. UBS Warburg case. In those opinions, Judge Scheindlin sanctioned UBS Warburg for not properly handling its electronic discovery, and in the process she has defined some fairly onerous standards to which lawyers and their clients may be held. Among them are expectations that a client produce electronic files in discovery, even (in some cases) from obscure and difficult-to-access sources; that lawyers individually meet with IT people to learn about their clients’ often Byzantine computer systems; and that the electronic information be produced correctly.
Reading these opinions can leave you with a feeling of impending doom, because much of what is expected is far beyond the reach of all but fairly technically inclined lawyers, and some is beyond the reach of all but the most technically sophisticated lawyers. The experts in the field are too costly for many clients. So lawyers are told, on the one hand, to “get the electronic files” and left, on the other, with no reasonable way to accomplish that task.
This terrible trend has been exacerbated by the third-party vendors, who have been more than happy to promote the most extreme views of electronic data capture requirements, requirements that unsurprisingly require outside experts to collect even the simplest set of computer files.
What is lacking is any how-to training on this subject, because the technology is too complicated to make accessible.
Expect to see challenges to the emerging legal regime by ordinary practitioners and some case law fighting the notion that every case requires a third-party forensic expert to create a bit-for-bit image of every potentially relevant employee’s hard drives.
Also expect to see some tools made available to law firms to allow them to do some of the electronic discovery processing themselves, something that will appeal to clients who do not want to pay the extremely high cost of outside vendors for smaller cases. This topic may be a good one for CLE and the work of technology committees.
This is not to criticize the outside vendors. At the same time as you see resistance in smaller cases, expect to see greater involvement of outside vendors to handle large-matter electronic discovery. The process of gathering, converting, and preparing these files is something that is very labor intensive and requires a high level of expertise. In a big case, few law firms would want to do this work, and farming out the work may be cost effective.
The problem is the software clients use. Expect clients to begin to take seriously the notion of questioning the back-end costs of some common office operating systems and applications before buying them. The most commonly used operating systems and e-mail programs use proprietary, closed formats. Many feel this software is at the root of the problem. Either the companies producing it will get religion on the need to make responding to discovery requests using their software simple and cheap, or they will be facing tough questions from, and possibly some lawsuits by, their customers.
E-mail management
The number of e-mail messages we receive is growing, even though spam tools are becoming much more effective. Programs like Microsoft Outlook 2003 include spam filtering that works fairly well. Outside services, such as Postini, provide firm-wide spam control.
But in-office spam is growing, and lawyers and their staff are using e-mail as a tool for communication to replace other tools, such as meeting, speaking, drafting memoranda, and the like. The result is a growing volume of e-mail messages. I probably am not atypical—I get 50-75 non-spam e-mail messages every day. That means in addition to my usual duties, I must read and handle these messages. Some take only a minute or two. Others require 10-20 minutes. Others require weeks of work. Others inform me of something I need to know. Like other lawyers, I am up to my ears in e-mail and must find effective ways to handle it.
Expect greater emphasis on policy-level solutions, such as policies prohibiting “thank you” e-mails, piecemeal communications, and inter-office jokes. Also, expect more attention to be paid to the need for time to handle e-mail overload, including in some cases work-free (e-mail clearing) days.
Expect greater use of e-mail management tools, such as the use of folders to store key messages, inbox size limitations, and document management programs like Worlddox or Interwoven.
Expect a lot more anxiety too.
Knowledge management
Law firms are capturing monumental amounts of information. Some of it comes in e-mail, some in the mail, some in boxes, some through research and investigation. The pace of practice has accelerated, and with it the amount of information. Clients now generate far more information, which we must handle. How do we keep track of it all?
At the same time, law firms are starting to think more like organizations with collective memories. That requires a firm to focus on getting bits and pieces of information out of the heads of lawyers and into a centralized knowledge bank.
Expect to see more focus on case management and case analysis tools. Programs like Time Matters and CaseMap are gaining in popularity. The description of Time Matters from its Web site shows the trend in a paragraph:
Time Matters® 7.0 — Finally, everything in one elegantly unified package; real-time office-wide calendars, task management and work delegation system, client/customer relations management, project/matter management, research/knowledge management, instant messaging, communications control (e-mail with spam blocker, phone, and fax), and more. Use as a complete solution or link with other leading software, such as QuickBooks®, Outlook®, WinFax® PRO, etc.
CaseMap’s description from the CaseSoft Web site shows another side of this trend, focusing more on analyzing the information:
CaseMap is our award-winning case analysis tool that makes it easy to organize and explore the facts, the cast of characters, and the issues in any case. From your first meeting regarding a new case, CaseMap helps you capture your thinking and communicate it to everyone on the team. New CaseMap 5 makes it even easier to analyze your cases.
With better knowledge management practices and better software to hold and analyze information, law firms will be better able to act like organizations.
The Future
There are number of notable trends I did not mention in this article, mainly because they have not taken hold as quickly as some have predicted. But they are still on the horizon.
The most interesting potential development will be when lawyers start taking technology seriously and get into the business of controlling their own software development. With the emergence of software tools comprehensible to the rest of us, mainly in the open source arena, expect to see some interesting and promising developments. We’ll try to keep you posted.
__________
About the Author: Todd Flaming is a partner at Schopf & Weiss LLP in Chicago and an Adjunct Professor of Law at the John Marshall Law School, where he teaches Technology in the Practice of Law. His litigation practice focuses on patent cases. He is a former Chair of the Committee on Legal Technology. He is also the Co-Chair of the ABA Litigation Section’s Technology for the Litigator Committee.
How many times have you been fumbling through a file looking for a specific document and said to yourself, “I just saw that thing in here yesterday!” What if instead of fumbling through that file (let’s call it the Smith v. Jones file) you could go to your computer, do a search, and within a matter of seconds have the document on the screen right in front of you?
Since the advent of digital technology, we’ve all heard the claims that we are moving toward a paperless society. However, the fact of the matter is that we lawyers will likely never be totally free of paper in our daily practices. Although we may not have paperless practices, we do have the ability to use widely available and relatively cheap technology that enables us to deal with less paper. The goal in moving toward a paperless office and thereby taming the paper tiger is to get our files under control. Achieving this goal allows us to save time, practice more efficiently, serve our clients more effectively, and ultimately be more profitable.
Taming the paper tiger initially involves addressing two basic questions. First, how do I get these documents “into” my computer? In other words, how can I get them into a digital format? Once the documents are in a digital format, this leads to the second question: now what do/can/should I do with them? This article will address these two questions by exploring the scanning process and imaging software.
Scanning. Scanning is simply the process of getting a paper document into a digital format. It is important to understand that scanning is not the same thing as OCR. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a process by which a document is scanned and the text (i.e., optical characters) are recognized, in theory enabling the user to take the resulting document and manipulate it with their word processing program. In practice, these programs have historically been slow and produced inaccurate documents with formatting problems. Rather, scanning is somewhat like photocopying a document in that it simply produces an exact copy of the original, but in a digital format.
In order to scan a document, you need a scanner. In considering what scanner to purchase, you will want to consider the volume of documents that will be scanned, the number of pages that will be scanned per job, and your budget. If you are a litigator that will be scanning in a bankers box of documents at a time, you will need a different scanner than the residential real estate attorney who may typically have just a handful of documents in a file.
There are three general categories of scanners: flatbed, portable, and document fed. Flatbed scanners are relatively small and inexpensive machines consisting of beds on which a single document is placed and then scanned. You can purchase good quality flatbeds for $300, but the limitation of scanning one page at a time makes them impractical for a law office environment. Portable scanners are even smaller than flatbeds and can be purchased for $200. However, they are generally designed for light duty use and are therefore likewise impractical for law office use.
The third general category of scanners are document-fed scanners. As the name suggests, these scanners can process a stack of documents by mechanically feeding them through the scanner. The scanner can capture an image of either one side of each document (a simplex scanner) or both sides (a duplex scanner). Quality document-fed scanners can be purchased for $400 on up to thousands of dollars, again depending on your document processing needs.
Back to the Smith v. Jones file. Luckily, the file is relatively new, so there are only 100 pages of documents in pleadings (just a complaint at this point), correspondence, client documents, and notes subfiles. With your brand new scanner connected to your system, you zip the contents of each subfile through the scanner. You save them in a Smith v. Jones folder in your system’s directory in subfolders with the respective names. Voila—you now have your file in digital format. Now what? Now you need to understand imaging so you can make use of your digital documents.
Imaging. There is a variety of electronic formats. Some of the more common formats include PDF (Portable Document Format) (files ending in .pdf), TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) (files ending in .tif), and JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) (files ending in .jpg).
By far, the most widely used format (at least when dealing with documents) is PDF. There are many reasons for this. First, PDF is typically the default format for scanners. In addition: there are no software compatibility issues (free copies of PDF software are available for download over the Internet); PDF preserves formatting (i.e., the document will look the same on my computer as yours); and creating a PDF eliminates most metadata (hidden information contained in a document). PDF files can also be secure (depending on security settings you apply) and searchable (more on that later).
While PDF is by far the most common electronic format, Adobe Acrobat is by far the most prominent PDF software. The three versions of Acrobat (i.e., Reader, Standard, and Professional) and several of their respective features are addressed elsewhere in this issue. This article will focus on some of the basic features available in Professional Version 7.0 that are most useful to a beginner.
PDF files can be created in several ways depending on whether they are generated inside or outside your office. External documents must be scanned and the resulting file can then be saved on your system. Internal documents can be turned into PDF files in several different ways. Within Acrobat itself, PDFs can be created by going to File and clicking Create PDF. From here, you can create a PDF out of a single file, multiple files, from a scanner, a Web page, or even from a clipboard image. Acrobat also makes it easy to create PDFs when using most other applications commonly used in a law office environment. When Acrobat is installed, it will “attach” itself to many other programs (particularly Microsoft products) and create Adobe PDF options on the program menu or toolbar.
We already have mastered scanning documents. At this point, the Smith v. Jones folder consists of only externally generated documents. However, you have just finished your answer to the complaint and want to create a PDF from the Word document to add it to the Smith v. Jones digital file. You can do this in several ways. First, you can “print” the document to PDF. To do this, simply go to File and then click Print. Chose Adobe PDF from the list of printer, click OK, and the PDF file will be created. The file will be saved in the same location and under the same name as your original file, unless you designate otherwise. You can also easily create a PDF file by going to Adobe PDF on the menu bar in Word and clicking Convert to Adobe PDF. Acrobat will convert the Word document into a PDF file, which you can then save in the pleadings subfolder of the Smith v. Jones folder.
After you have converted the answer to PDF, you send an e-mail to your client with a status update and attach a copy of the answer to your message. As usual, you copy yourself on the message so you can have a record of the e-mail. You can easily create a PDF of this message and the attachment. If you are using Outlook, you simply go to Adobe PDF on the menu bar and click Convert to Adobe PDF. You can convert a single message or an entire folder into a PDF file.
One of the most useful functions of Acrobat is the ability to search for information within PDF files. It is first important to understand the difference between PDF files that you have scanned into your system versus PDFs that you created internally. Scanning a file in creates an image-only PDF file. Think of it as just a snapshot photograph of the original. If you performed a search for a word that you knew was in the document, the search would not yield any results because Acrobat would not “see” the text within the snapshot.
However, it is possible to convert image-only files to pages of searchable text. To do so, use the Recognize Text Using OCR command in Acrobat. Go to Documents on the menu to find this feature. You can select the current page, selected pages, or all pages to recognize text. You should keep in mind that the accuracy of the process depends on several factors, including the quality of the scan and the text in the original documents. For example, the OCR scan will likely not pick up someone’s scribbling on the margins of a documents.
Now that you have converted all of the image-only files in the Smith v. Jones folder, you can search for words or phrases within the files. Go to Edit and click Search. The search window will pop up somewhere on your screen where you can enter the word or phase you want to search for and the document or folders you would like searched. When the search has been completed, a results window will appear in the search window showing each place your word or phrase was found in the documents searched.
This article is simply an introduction to the concept of the paperless office, the conversion of paper documents into digital files, and some basic features of the leader in PDF software, Adobe Acrobat. Of course, there are many other useful features of interest to lawyers available in Acrobat, as the other article in this newsletter highlights. We will take a more in-depth look at some of these features in upcoming issues, so stay tuned.
__________
About the Author: Trent L. Bush has been a member of the Committee on Legal Technology since 2002. He is a partner in the Sterling office of Ward, Murray, Pace & Johnson, P.C.
Favorites is a feature of the newsletter that highlights those programs, utilities, gizmos, gadgets, etc., that we love. Sure, we could probably live without these, but who would want to. If you have a favorite you want to tell others about, contact Bryan Sims at bsims@jgtattorneys.com. This installment of Favorites discusses the use of Dual Monitors.
Using Two (or more) Monitors
Since Windows 95 Microsoft has built-in support for the use of multiple monitors. Most people, however, have never explored this uncharted territory. In fact, I had not explored the idea of using more than one monitor until I switched computers from a desktop to a laptop. When my firm was purchasing the laptop, I decided against getting a docking station. The only real benefit that I saw from having a docking station would be that it would connect my notebook to a full sized keyboard and monitor. I quickly determined that I could handle those chores better myself.
By choosing not to get a docking station, I knew that I would be able to keep my monitor from my desktop and use it in conjunction with my new notebook. After receiving my notebook, however, I quickly determined that I could not see its screen very well when I placed it on my desk. I found a great Off-Desk Shelf <http://tinyurl.com/bhsjq> at Office Depot that places the notebook at the proper height for working. As an added bonus, I can also store items (such as paper clips and my PDA cradle) under the shelf. To enable myself to type, I also added a full sized keyboard and mouse.
I now had my notebook, which sits in front of my on a shelf, and my monitor, which sits slightly to its left. Connecting the second monitor was a breeze. Windows XP has built in support for dual monitors. I had only to plug in the external monitor and go to settings to enable dual monitor support. I am now set up with two monitors (the one on my notebook and my external monitor that I used to use with my desktop). Once I started working this way, I fell in love with it. It really is great to be able to work on two different documents, with one on each monitor. This makes it much easier to cut and paste from different documents. Also, even if I am working on only one document, I will typically have that document open on one monitor and have my e-mail program open on the other. This allows me to quickly check e-mails as they arrive without disturbing what I am doing in Word.
Another great benefit is that it is that the set up is very useful when doing legal research. I can have Westlaw open in a window on one monitor and have the document I am working in open on the other. Again this makes it easy to cut and paste. It also makes it easy to check citations or to review cases as I am paraphrasing what happened in the case.
An additional benefit to using the two monitor setup is the surprised look I get from most people who have no idea that such a thing can even be done. Once I had a vendor in the office demonstrating a product. He had to access his product using Internet Explorer. I already had IE open on my external monitor. However, my mouse pointer was currently on my notebook monitor. I turned my seat over to the vendor and he could not understand that he could use the mouse to get to the external monitor. He kept telling me that he needed a mouse for the other monitor. I tried explaining that he just had to move the mouse over and it would go to the other monitor. Despite what I said, he still did not understand that the two monitors were connected. Finally, I had to take the mouse from him and move it to the external monitor before he understood that the monitors were connected.
In my situation adding a second monitor was extremely easy and, because I was already switching from a desktop to a laptop, it cost me nothing. This is so because I was using my monitor from my old desktop setup. Also, I needed no additional hardware because my laptop already had a connection for an external monitor.
You can also have multiple monitor support using a desktop setup. In such a situation, you will have to either find an extra monitor (I have found that in most offices there is usually at least one spare monitor laying around) or you will have to purchase one. Also, to enable multiple monitor use on a desktop, you will have to install a video card with dual monitor support, add a second video card to your desktop, or use a video splitter. Depending on how your desires and requirements, this could cost anywhere from as little as $50 to more than $200. Regardless, you will quickly find that the expense well worth it.
Once you go to a set up like this, you will wonder how you ever worked with only one monitor. The only drawback I have found is that I get to used to working that way and I miss my second monitor when I am outside the office. I highly recommend adding a second monitor to your set up. I wish I had done it years ago.
UltraMon 2.6
As I mentioned above, Windows comes with built in support for multiple monitors. Although this works fine, there is very little that you can do to tweak your monitor use. I have found a program called UltraMon <http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/> that is a perfect utility for multiple monitor management.
The best feature about UltraMon is that it adds two additional buttons to your windows. Windows creates standard buttons in the upper right hand corner of each window. These buttons allow you to minimize, maximize, and close your window. UltraMon add two additional buttons. One button allows you to send that window to your other monitor. One click, and the window is on your second monitor. The second button allows you to maximize the window over all of your monitors at once, creating one large desktop. Although I rarely use UltraMon’s maximize button, I use the switch monitor button constantly.
UltraMon also allows you to manage the desktops on your two monitors separately. Thus, you can have a different wallpaper on each monitor. This works great in a situation where you have two kids and want to have a picture of each as your wallpaper. With UltraMon you can also have different screen savers running on each of your monitors.
UltraMon also creates a smart taskbar on your second monitor. With the smart taskbar each taskbar shows only the applications from the monitor it is on. This way, you will not have to search for an application after activating it. If you move an application to a different monitor, its taskbar button will be moved to the corresponding taskbar.
Also, UltraMon allows you to mirror your monitors. This is useful, for example, to show documents to a client or other person who is sitting opposite of you. Also, UltraMon supports the use of more than 10 monitors.
UltraMon is a available for download for a 30 day trial period. A single user license costs $39.99. I purchased UltraMon soon after I added a second monitor. I find it absolutely invaluable and would not run a multiple monitor setup without it.