Scientists’s desk
What general office software is useful for scientists? I come to the following enumeration: an email client, a calendar manager, a browser, a document formatter (for non-scientific papers), a spreadsheet and presentation software. Microsoft sells software providing all these functionalities, and indeed many scientists use the Microsoft products Outlook, Internet Explorer, MS-Word, MS-Excel and MS-PowerPoint. However, with free - technically speaking - superior products Google is now challenging the leading position of Microsoft in this traditionally Microsoft territory

When people reply to an email message I sent them, they often append my (full) email message in the body of their email. When I look at the text of my echoed email I get frustrated. I see that my text has acquired a large number of awkward line breaks, at positions where I certainly did not put them. With these new breaks the text is much more difficult to read.
Can we prevent this mutilation of our email text?

In the internet protocol descriptions (RFC’s) servers and clients are allowed to add line breaks (”\CR\LF”) wherever they like. This convention has has been prescribed to ensure that text messages will survive any network, irrespective of platform, operating system.

The arrival of email has opened up a new communication channel that can be extremely efficient. Actually sometimes too efficient. It can take 30 seconds to write an email that means hours of work on the receiving side. This, together with the sheer volume of work-related emails that scientists tend to receive, can provoke a lot of stress.

Scientists (like myself) often struggle to organize themselves properly. It is then very tempting to use your inbox as a to-do list. The messages in your inbox are often connected to tasks, and you can simply leave them in the inbox until you have dealt with them. Most of my colleagues work this way.