By Cheryl Currid

Imagine the perfect -- and paperless -- office. You have any piece of your business information at the click of a mouse.

You can call up anything from a receipt for the lunch you bought your best customer to the bill for tires you purchased three years ago. You are organized, in charge of the facts, and nothing slips by you.

Better yet, you work in an office without a file cabinet. All your information is online and instantly accessible at the push of a button.

OK, you can stop dreaming. The paperless office isn't here yet. While I don't have all the keys to going paperless, I do know the path. It starts with a scanner, software and a change of habits. Getting the scanner and software right is the easy part. Changing habits -- even for an office of one -- can be difficult.

Let's start with the easy part -- the technology. My favorite new software solution comes from Visioneer. This company, which pioneered many new concepts in desktop scanners, is out with an industrial-strength package called the Visioneer 9650 USB.

It passed my first test when I discovered it was designed for Windows XP. While not a prerequisite for every device I test, I find that products designed for XP are often user-friendly. Of course, the scanner is also compatible with older operating systems including Windows ME, 2000 and 98.

Since this device goes on a physical desktop or table, it next had to pass my desktop space test. Technology has to earn its way onto the limited real estate desktop in my home office. I found that Visioneer put all of my scanning essentials into a neat and compact package. It passes with flying colors because it packs a high-quality 42-bit internal color scanner with modes that go up to 600 by 1,200 dots per inch optical resolution.

But best of all, it includes a very reliable automatic document feeder that allows for reports of up to 25 pages to feed through the scanner. I have found that the ADF is probably one of the best kept secrets in the imaging industry and a key technology for people who want to go paperless.

The Visioneer 9650 USB can scan many different sizes of documents from pictures and post cards up to 8.5 inches by 14 inches through its ADF. It's speedy and can scan up to 12 pages per minute at 200 dpi in black and white -- perfect for textual documents. This is a great time saver because you don't have to hover over the scanner feeding in pages one by one.

The scanner also has a flatbed scanner and can scan documents up to 8.5 inches by 11.7 inches. So you can scan pages from books or bound documents.

Finally comes the software integration. The Visioneer 9650 USB comes with ScanSoft PaperPort Deluxe 7 and ScanSoft TextBridge Pro 9 OCR that use optical character recognition. This software bundle makes scanning, handling, editing and organizing electronic copies effortless and very easy to share with others.

For more information, or to purchase the scanner, go to http://www.visioneer.com/. Its list price is $599.

The final step toward a paperless office is learning how to break those old analog habits. That's the hardest part.