Gone are the days of the messy and chalky blackboard, both in the classroom and in conference centers. The blackboard has been replaced by the whiteboard. Users write with dry-wipe pens instead of chalk. The pens come in about eight colors.

Dry wipe pens leave marks that can simply be erased using a duster or clean board duster. The pens do leave a powdery residue when the board is wiped clean. Using dry wipe pens is considerably more expensive than chalk, but much less messy.

Whiteboards also make excellent additions to home offices, kitchens and garages. Jot your notes, to do tasks and phone messages on the whiteboard and they will never be lost, as pieces of paper will be.

A whiteboard will allow you to prioritise all the tasks associated with running a business from home. Planning is made much easier, too. My Internet business revolves around my white-boards.

Whiteboards come in a wide range of sizes, though the common sizes are 3 feet by 4 feet and 6 feet by 4 feet. Buy the biggest one you can fit on your wall space, because you will manage to fill it much faster than you think. You may have to buy from a specialist office supplier, like Viking Direct, because high street stores are often limited in the stock they carry.

Interactive whiteboards are another ball game entirely. An interactive board will cost hundreds of dollars, as opposed to a dry wipe plastic board that only has a cost of thirty dollars or so.

An interactive board allows users to use special non-marking pens that appear to write on the surface, but the board clears when the computer attached to the whiteboard is switched off.

The interactive board comes into its own when it is used with specially designed software that allows users to project spreadsheets onto the board, then draw on the board with special "pens", that leave a colored mark on the board, which disappears when the PC is turned off. There is really no mark there at all.