I am a big fan of spreadsheets and I believe that most lawyers never leverage the power available in these programs. If you have never used a spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel or Open Office Calc, do yourself a favor and take a class to learn how to use it. You can manage, sort, and analyze data in a spreadsheet in ways that you could never contemplate on either pen and paper or a word processor.

Related to the power of a spreadsheet is a post from Tom Mighell at Inter Alia, where he talks about creating a timeline using Excel. Tom points to a helpful article detailing how to create timelines in Excel.