The Joy of Laminating and a Way Better Mouse Pad
Not everything that’s useful has a microprocessor.
Take a laminator, for example.
The Royal (https://www.royal.com/) SuperGuard LaminatorPlus that I bought a couple of years ago for $100 has become an indispensable office tool. It lets you laminate just about anything on paper, from photographs to business cards to luggage tags to employee ID cards.
It’s a great way to give a sense of permanence to a price list, product flier or even a memo that you want everyone to pay attention to. Laminated signs not only look better but seem more important when they’re encased in clear plastic. Laminated documents also last longer, are impervious to coffee spills, and are less likely to fade than regular documents.
Salespeople can laminate their collateral material, punch holes in the sheets, display them in a three-ring binder and never have to worry about them getting dirty or frayed. Supplies aren’t all that expensive; 8 1/2-by-11-inch plastic pouches cost about 20 cents each.
* Just about every office prints reports and marketing documents for internal and external use. Instead of stapling them, you can bind them for a more finished look.
If you do this only on occasion, your best bet is to go to Kinko’s or another copy shop and have it done for you. But if you do it often, consider buying your own binding system, such as the Ibico (https://www.ibico.com) Hi-Tech Binding System (about $150) that lets you create spiral-bound booklets. The plastic spirals, called combs, that hold the booklet together start at about 5 cents apiece for a size big enough for one to 10 pages. The price rises to about 40 cents each for 2-inch combs that bind documents up to 425 sheets.
* If you sometimes need to print smaller documents such as postcards or small handouts, one option is to buy standard-sized paper and cut it to size.
Paper cutters come in two basic varieties. The guillotine-style has a large blade that you lower onto the paper. The rotary-style has a small round blade that you push over the paper. Rotary trimmers allow for more precise cutting without frayed edges, and they give you a choice of blade styles. Fiskars (https://www.fiskars.com/) makes 12- and 24-inch cutters starting at under $50 that take a variety of blades, including one that perforates paper. With a printer and a device like this, it would be easy to create small quantities of brochures with a tear-off portion that customers could use to provide you with information.
* Does your telephone ever get in your way? Belkin makes a Pro Series Telephone Stand for $19.99. Its swivel arm lets you move it away or toward you as needed. It also stations the phone a few inches above your desk so you can keep things under it.
* Mouse pads are commodity items that often come with PCs. But, believe it or not, some companies have built better mouse pads. 3M’s Precise Mousing Surface (about $10) is the only mouse pad I’ve used that actually improves the performance of the mouse. It’s much thinner than the average mouse pad and it’s composed of tiny “peaks and valleys” that seem to give more control of the mouse. It also helps keep the mechanism inside the mouse squeaky clean. That’s important because dirty mice can be harder to use.
If you know of particularly useful high- or low-tech office tools, send me e-mail and I’ll consider them for a future column.
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Lawrence J. Magid can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web site is at https://www.larrysworld.com. On AOL, use keyword “LarryMagid.”
