Over the past few decades, I've spent many days on the road -- often involved in presentations or seminars in one city or another. During this time, my clients, associates and I have become less dependent on paper, but we still haven't shaken the need to get papers in the system -- whether they are handwritten items, historical documents or business cards.

Years ago, we would carry around a fairly large flatbed scanner that needed to be babied, because the glass platter on most scanners is breakable and moving sensors are prone to breaking when being jarred.

If only we had IrisScan Executive 2 back then. IrisScan is a scanner, not much larger than a pencil box, and at less than  3/4-pound, lighter than a loaf of bread. I'm weight-sensitive when I travel -- always looking for the lightest laptops and trying to keep from carrying too heavy a load. (You should see when I scale down multipage documents to half-size -- then print both sides -- to reduce the space and weight by four times.) So a small, light functional scanner appeals to the need for paper and my desire for portability.

The IrisScan fits nicely into a briefcase alongside many laptop computers, so you can carry it on a plane without even needing a second bag. It connects to the laptop by USB cable without requiring a power cable, because it gets its power straight through the USB port, making it a truly portable, full-featured scanner.

Once it's installed, getting your documents into your laptop is as easy as plugging in the IrisScan; then pressing a button. The scanner and included software do the rest.

There are only two buttons on the IrisScan -- one that sends your file to IrisScan's software bundle for manipulation, and one that can be set to automatically save your document to disk or to automatically place it as an attachment to an e-mail. I can envision where the automatic e-mail attachment would be helpful to people in industries in which you need to get a paper document from a client sitting in front of you to an associate in your office. In either case, getting your document into the right format could be as easy as inserting the page and pressing a button.

The IrisScan comes with a full suite of software for Windows and Mac that allows you to turn the scanned image into a page with editable text (aka OCR -- optical character recognition), edit the graphics, or translate into a number of languages. Using these features requires more than the one-touch approach, but adds to the usefulness of the scanner.

Instead of sending a French page of instructions back from a meeting in France, you might be able to send it back in English. Or you might be able to save your document in an editable Microsoft Word format or as a searchable Adobe Reader file readable by almost any computer.

Don't expect it to work flawlessly, though. That's not the nature of the beast. When you turn pages to text, it's not always exact. Twos sometimes come out as Z; and you can't always be sure that it won't confuse a lower case o with a capital O or a zero.

All-in-all, the extreme portability and flexibility of the IrisScan make it a unique product, worthy of consideration by road warriors who need to get information from paper to computer -- even if only occasionally. Prices at Web retailers range from $150 to $200.