Until the "paperless office" becomes a reality, you'll need some way to get what's on paper into your computer in a usable form. That's what a scanner does, and here's what you can use it for:

Processing graphic images. If you're selling widgets, wouldn't you want photos of your widgets in your sales brochures, or on the Web page you've just set up? Scanners can process photographs and store them as standard file formats used by graphic programs. You can then use these programs to adjust brightness, contrast and color balance, and even edit the images. (A good graphics program is better than Clearasil for removing skin blemishes.) You can also scan logos, drawings and illustrations for use with word processors or desktop publishing programs.

Here's a neat trick: Scan your signature. Once you've done this, you can copy it directly into the documents you're faxing from your computer.

Faxing. Your fax-modem is a great gadget, but it can only handle the documents you create on your computer. With a scanner, you can create images of letters, articles, advertisements -- and other stuff that exists outside your computer -- and fax them to somebody else.

Copying. If you don't have a copier at home, just scan a page and print out as many copies as you want on your printer. Scanners are slow and awkward compared to copiers, so they're not good for volume work. But they're fine for the occasional copy.

Optical Character Recognition. This magic act turns printed pages into text that you can edit with a word processor, spreadsheet or desktop publishing program. Optical character recognition (OCR) software is included with most scanners. It looks at the patterns of dots your scanner creates and turns them into actual characters. Better OCR programs can even be trained to recognize printed forms and store the information from them in a database. But beware, OCR doesn't work equally well with all typefaces and sizes. If you're wrestling with a format your OCR program doesn't handle well, you could spend as much time correcting errors as you would have spent typing the information yourself.