Thank you for suggestions; my scanner result not great but still neat.Going to ebay to shop now. Interestingly,I placed a rose bud in a clear glass vase and 2 hours later the waxy strands and little varmits were more visible due to magnifying effects of water/glass. Also 6 hrs later when I looked at bud with my poor magnifier even I could make out the aphids accumulating along the rose top edge-like a bunch of sailors waiting for rescue from a sinking ship. Ha. Makes me think twice about who I would give a bouquet of flowers to. Thanks for your help.

I have an Epson V200 scanner. It is a flatbed scanner that can also slide film and slides. I paid around $80 for it. I bought this over a year ago. I am not sure of the availabilty of this certain model, as it has been discontinued, - other than eBay or Amazon. I can scan up to 4 slides at once. You load the slide tray and press scan. It puts each slide into a seperate file. You can specify where you want them saved. It is quite simple to use and I have been extremely happy with the results. It will scan at up to 4800 dpi. I generally scan my slides at a resolution of 600 dpi - and can get fantasic 4x6 prints. If you were looking to make poster size prints, you would want to up your dpi. The higher the dpi - the larger the file and the longer it takes to scan. If you do not have a lot of "horsepower" in your computer, scanning at really high dpi will take a long time. Scanning dpi and printing dpi are two entirely different things. You can google and research this further if you want. This is a slide from the early 1950's, scanned at 600 dpi. You can correct dust, backlighting, etc. I think HP has a flatbed scanner that can scan 16 slides at a time..this would be sweet if you are looking at a large number of slides. I love my Epson scanner - but have also been happy with HP scanners. I have attached a link to HP. It is very informative regarding slide scanning. Here is a link that might be useful: Slide scanning - from HP

I don't know if this is related or not, but thought I would post it anyway. My W 7 came with word and I had always used works, so I had a lot to learn. One of the things was copy and pasting from a web site, I couldn't not edit it. One item was a list of books from a web site. The list took up 3 pages of double spaced titles and I could not edit it to one page. I googled and found the solution. When you paste in word there are 3 options, I chose A which was "text only". That way the formatting is not pasted with the document and I could edit the pages. I ended up with two columns, single spaced on one page. You might try copy and pasting your document to another page and try that option if you have it. This post was edited by EmmaR on Wed, Apr 24, 13 at 10:47

Be very careful about committing your only copies of financial records to digital. Someone above suggested copying onto rewritable CDs (CD-RW) to allow you to add to what's on there. Be aware that CD-RWs typically have significantly shorter lifespans than "write-once" CDs (CD-Rs). You could run into trouble a few years down the line when you try to retrieve some info and find out that the disc is corrupted and what you want is not retrievable. Burnable CDs also are a textbook example of getting what you pay for. The spindle of 100 CDs that is "free after rebate" at your local electronics superstore typically is of very low quality, and I would not depend on them to keep anything beyond 6-12 months. They may make it that long. But I sure wouldn't put all two copies of important documents on such low-quality discs. Finally, there is the file format of the disc and files themselves. The scrapheap of history is littered with storage technologies that were made obsolete by size, low capacity, or bankruptcy. While Microsoft's dominance now seems to ensure some longevity, at one time Microsoft was the David in the corner to other companies' Goliaths. What it comes down to is that scanning important documents may save you some paper, but it is not "set it and forget it". It will cause you additional work in transferring those files to new formats/applications/operating systems as years go by. If this is not something that interests you or seems like too much work for an activity that's supposed to save you effort, then you might just want to stuff file folders into a cabinet. I'm as big a computer geek as they come -- and that's what I do. Paper: simple, reasonably permanent, and eminently transportable.