Office and Sharepoint 2007 User's Guide: Integrating Sharepoint with Excel, Outlook, Access and WordPaperback, 13 May 2008

SharePoint may be the biggest thing to affect the way you and I work in our offices since . . . well . . . since Microsoft Office. Word showed us how to write and edit our writing more efficiently on a computer screen than we ever could before with a typewriter. Similarly, Excel showed us how to manipulate numbers more accurately than any accounting sheet created with pencil and paper. (Okay, I know there were some word processors before MS Word and spreadsheets before MS Excel, but just go with me for a second. ) Over the years, Microsoft Office has become so pervasive that it is almost impossible to get an office job today if you do not have a firm understanding of at least Word and Excel. But we still store hundreds of files in dozens of different directories and even different servers across our companies. Documents are created and printed and then carried from one office to another. Sometimes, dozens of copies are made and distributed. Some get lost. Some find their way into file folders in people's desks. Others get archived into boxes and stored offsite in the fear that someday, someone may want to see them again. The electronic revolution of the 1990s and early 2000s did not free us from paper. Rather, it seems to have buried us deeper in a rising tide of paper that comes into our inbox faster than we can file it, much less read it.