A woman walked into a nature reserve’s office. She tapped her name on the welcome screen kiosk. Bink. A tadpole appeared above her name to indicate she had checked in. She approached the receptionist (that’s me).

“I’m here to pull invasive plants out of the reserve. Do you have a list of plants that grow here?”

“Do I ever!” I exclaimed. I slammed a four-inch-thick binder onto the counter and flipped open the pages. “All these plants, complete with pictures and information.”

The woman glowed with excitement as she flipped through the plant pages. “Do you have this in something I can carry?” Granted, she wasn’t much larger than the binder. While I sat stumped, she clarified, “Do you have a digital copy?”

Long story short, she got a PDF she can flip through on her phone while out in the reserve pulling out invasive plants. The binder? It’s still in the front office as an artifact.

What is a PDF anyway? It’s a picture file at heart, an array of colored lights. But unlike its older siblings JPG, PNG, and good old BMP, PDF is the only image file format that can hold multiple pages in one file. That’s what documents tend to do. They tend to grow beyond one page. My sister learned this when her scanner turned her 30-page report into 30 separate JPG files. She said, “I can’t email this report in 30 pieces!” Nope. Choose the PDF format and try again.

PDF’s creator gave it some lame name like Portable Document Format. It certainly is more portable than that four-inch binder. Still, I prefer its spirit name, Paperless Document File. For me, paperless is a way of life.

Thanks to PDF, I have squeezed ten file cabinets of important papers into a digital storage drive that fits in a shirt pocket. I call this “going paperless”. If you opt for PDF before it’s even printed, we call that “going green”. That decision saves trees. Trees grow leaves. Leaves are green. Leaves absorb carbon dioxide for their photosynthesis addiction. It’s a whole thing.

So why would this woman at the reserve want to pull out perfectly healthy plants that are happily sucking up all the catastrophic CO₂? Well, that’s another whole thing. Here’s a short answer.

And that’s where Computer Corner is going, going, gone. I am trading my Computer Corner writing time for greener pastures in the new Native Garden Club.

I hope the Computer Corner column has helped you in your computer life. I still write computer tips on my blog, PaperlessPonteVedra.com. I still offer free computer help at the clubhouse by appointment. Computers aren’t going anywhere, and neither am I.