Office automation products have become more affordable and their sizes have also shrunk to fit snugly in small offices. In fact, they have become so compact that they can be easily carried around and taken out of the office. Examples of “road warrior” (a term given to people who do a lot of work outside the office) items are the laptop computer, PDA, thumb drive, MP3 player/voice recorder, etc.

Thumb/flash drives have replaced the floppy diskettes. Not only do thumb drives store more information, they are smaller and can fit comfortably in your pocket with ample space to spare. Thumb drives come in different storage capacities, from 128MB (getting phased out) to 8GB, equivalent to the storage capacities of about 5,600 pieces of 1.44MB floppy diskettes! Thumb drives are handy to carry around, especially if you need to carry softcopies of your files with you or to save copies of your clients’ files. Their sizes are getting smaller and smaller but their capacities are getting bigger and bigger. They can be easily connected to the USB sockets on your PC.