The next couple of OneManOffice posts are going to describe products from a great company, 37signals.  If you want to know more about their philosophy for building simple, useful, elegant web-based applications, check out their book, Getting Real. 

Backpack is an online organizational tool, a place to keep your notes, lists, ideas, events, photos, files — basically, any bits of information that you would want to keep track of.  You can create separate pages based on whatever categories you feel are useful, and then fill those pages with your notes, lists, photos, etc. (Full disclosure: If you sign up using the link I provided, I’ll get discounts to my own Backpack account.) 

Here are some pictures that might help make more sense. 

Backpack is based around pages.  You create these pages based on whatever categories you want.  They are listed in a sidebar, generally in alphabetical order, but you can “cheat” on that order by adding numbers or blank spaces to the front of a page name. 

Once you’ve made a page, you can add your content – text notes, lists, photos, even dividers so that you can further organize your life. Here’s the top of my home page, where you can see the different items you can add.  As you can also see, Backpack includes a calendar feature (which can read Google calendars), a reminders function that will email you one-time or repeating reminders, and integration with 37signals’ Writeboard, an online document creator. 

Then, you just start adding!  Here’s a page that I create to help me keep track of books that I want to read. 

(iBackpack is a little snippet of code so that I can use Backpack on my iPhone – cool, eh?) 

What makes Backpack so great, as opposed to say, oh, any of the other organizational tools out there? 

• It’s free.  Actually it’s free for your first 5 pages, but that’s very useful in and of itself. That’s how I got started – created a free account and set up a few pages.  I used the free account for months before I upgraded.  And the upgrades are not expensive.  The lowest level upgrade is $7 per month. (All of 37signals’ products are based on monthly subscription rates.) 
• It’s easy. It’s very intuitive, and there’s really nothing to learn.  There are certainly some tricks that you can pick up from the user forums, but you can start using Backpack out of the gate without any kind of learning curve. 

Is there anything else you need to know other than it’s free and easy to use? There is one more cool feature that will make it very useful to anyone who has to share information with colleagues in other offices.  Recently, Backpack added a multi-user feature, so that it can act like an intranet for files, notes, or other things you need to share.  You can also make Backpack pages public, making it a very easy way to create simple webpages.  Here’s a public copy of my reading list, so that you can see exactly how behind I am. 

 

A continuing series on free or low-cost tools for the one person office. 

Office suites – not physical offices, but stuff like word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software, etc. – are necessary for conducting business.  Microsoft Office dominates this field, but can be expensive ($150 for the most basic package, $400 or more in other incarnations).  Fortunately, there are some excellent free alternatives.

OpenOffice/NeoOffice

OpenOffice is an open-source office suite (NeoOffice is a version for Macs).  It’s similar to Microsoft Office, but 100% free.  If you’re accustomed to using Word or Excel, then it will not take you long to get used to OpenOffice.  

The next two options are both based online – they are great options if you have a good internet connection or need to collaborate with others, but maybe not so great if you are still using dial-up or tend to edit documents while out and about. 

Google Docs

If you have a Google account, then you already have access to Google Docs, their free, online office suite.  Google Docs includes a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation creator.  Its interface is simple and easy to use.  While it doesn’t include as many options as Microsoft Office or OpenOffice, it will be sufficient for most users. 

Zoho

Zoho is not as well-known as Google Docs, but offers an incredible array of software options.  I use Google Docs because the rest of my team uses it.  However, if I were starting from scratch, I might use Zoho instead.  It offers the same word processor/spreadsheet/presentation trio as Google, and then adds an note taking program, database,  project management, CRM software, online meeting software, invoicing and more.  All of Zoho’s products are free to start using.  The business-oriented products – like CRM, invoiving, project management – start off free, then add fees if you increase your usage.  

Both Google Docs and Zoho are web-based, but Zoho added offline access and syncing in 2007, and Google introduced offline access earlier this year and is in the process of rolling it out to its users. 

Since all of these are free, I actually use a combination of Google Docs and NeoOffice.  When I have documents I need to share with my team, I use Google Docs, but use NeoOffice if I’m editing, say, a Microsoft Word doc or Excel spreadsheet that someone emailed me.  I use Apple’s iWork for presentations and for “nicer” publications (like my prayer letter).  iWork is not free, but is still much cheaper than Microsoft Office ($79, $99 for a family pack to run it on up to 5 computers in the same house).