While we’ve been using the iPad here for a while, other localities in Virginia have begun to adopt the tablets as a way to trim the budget. The latest adopter is the City Council of Williamsburg.

Williamsburg is hoping to save $2,000 a year by using the iPads rather than generating the mounds of papers which are needed for meetings and inter-office memos and legal papers and everything else that council members need. Now they will be able to generate the documents on their computers and send them to each council member’s iPad via email or Dropbox or Evernote or any number of other means and never have to waste paper and ink printing any of it out.

It’s a good plan. The iPad a useful tool for the modern office. As everyone reading this blog knows, we have done our best to become as paperless as possible in the Wise Commonwealth Attorney’s Office. Both our Circuit Court Clerk’s office and our office have developed similar programs which allow us to both view the Clerk’s file and our office file via any computer. Using the iPad allows us to use these rather than running off copies for court. Prior to the iPad you either printed papers from your office computer or packed up that desktop and carried it to court every day. The tablet is also useful for accessing statutes and cases online when you need to do some quick research in the courtroom. No need to copy statutes from books or print cases from Lexis. Personally, I find the most useful app to be Evernote, which allows me to enter .pdf documents from a case file on my regular computer as well as personal notes and then access them on all my computers. It is particularly useful on the iPad. The combination of the Evernote and the iPad has allowed me to stop taking any files to court. I’m sure that a little ingenuity on the part of the Williamsburg City Council will make the iPad at least as useful for them as it is for us.

Cross posted from my blawg, CrimLaw.

I was given the Sewell Minideck to review on my blawg, CrimLaw, but it worked well and I thought I’d cross post the review here.

This is a useful device which will allow you to hook multiple monitors to your computer. It’s amazing how quickly you come to rely on having three monitors running at the same time. Right now I’m sitting at my desk with the primary monitor (the one built into the Mac) displaying a browser (Opera), one displaying Evernote, and the last has TweetDeck up. Heck, I wish I had another monitor, or two, up and running because now whenever I need to use Lotus Symphony or a second browser I have to minimize TweetDeck or Evernote; I may just have to buy another Minideck. Or two. Or three. Having multiple monitors running at the same time turns out to be a convenience I never knew I needed, but now don’t want to do without.

Caveat: Have some realistic expectations for this product. You’re not going to pump enough video through a USB cord to render the 3D graphics in Space Warriors on the Zombie Planet of Doom 6: The Awakened Re-Reckoning. Still, it’s perfect for office use.

Our office received a free review download of AnyBizSoft’s PDF to Word for Mac and Ron asked me if I’d review it for The Digital Office.

Ease of Use: 5 out of 5

Output: 2.7 out of 5

In operation, this program is simplicity itself. When you first pull it up you get a blank square with a CONVERT button at the bottom.

All you have to do is use the mouse to click and drag .pdf files into the box and click convert. There’s very little else you can do. The only setting you can really change is whether the output will be .doc or .rtf. It was a little disappointing that the program converts into .rtf rather than .odt, as .rtf is a relic of a bygone era and .odt is the modern multi-platform format. However, that’s more of an advanced user complaint and it is hard to fault the program much for this flaw because most people won’t use anything other than .doc because of Word’s predominance.

Below is a picture of the program set to convert to .doc (left) and .rtf (right).

Once you have entered as many .pdf files as you wish to convert, you click the CONVERT button and they are rather quickly converted to the output format. I’m going to concentrate on the .doc format and assume that the .rtf conversions will contain the usual flaws which occur when one uses that format. And, as I said above, I don’t imagine many people will use any format but .doc anyway.

I put 5 files through the conversion process.

The first was this week’s court docket. We get this via email every week in a .pdf format. After conversion, this would only show blank screens when I used Lotus Symphony or OpenOffice to view it. However, in Word the entire docket came up, but it was basically converted into an image which made it even less useful than the .pdf file was. I rate this as a 1 out of 5.

The second was a law review article which I had downloaded from Lexis. It converted this so that it looked exactly like the law review article. The conversion worked in Lotus Symphony and OpenOffice as well as Word. The only difference was that the Lexis graphic only appeared when I used Word. I rate this as a 4.5 out of 5.

The third was a document which came when I got DropBox for the iPad and it had several graphics included in it with the text formed around it. This converted perfectly when I used the .doc file in Word, in the other word processors it converted the text but did not show the graphics. I rate this a 5 out of 5 (AnyBizSoft made no claims as to any program but Word).

The fourth was a brief I had previously written and converted into a .pdf via Lotus Symphony. When it was converted it looked almost exactly as it did in the .pdf. There were some flaws which appeared no matter which word processor I used. Things I had underlined (such as case names) had a [tab] added at the end with the underlining continuing. As well, the right side of each line was a hard return rather than a margin. Thus, if I went to add something the line extended off the right side off the page and when it finally moved to the next line it did not join the line below it, but forced the lower line to go down a line. I rate this a 3 out of 5.

The fifth was a sentencing guidelines document. This is a .pdf which has blanks where information can be added. After conversion, when I looked at this on Word, it got the formatting perfectly, but where the information had been entered it was blank. I rate this a 0 out of 5.

Overall Recommendation: If you are looking to convert simple documents this program may prove useful, but it is not robust enough to be something relied upon in an office receiving multiple .pdf’s from various sources or those using the more advanced features of .pdf