One great thing about having a regular column is receiving feedback from readers. Over the past few months, you’ve sent in responses to columns offering advice and comments. Here is a look at some of that insider wisdom.

A few weeks ago, I talked about the perils of the power outage and offered some tips for preparing for this inevitability. One home-office veteran sent in these recommendations:

“Just a thought after surviving a one-week power outage several years ago - think 'Ice Storm' (a 1997 movie starring Kevin Kline). I discovered if you toss the relatively low-capacity UPS battery with a car battery or two in parallel you can get days of power for your computers, etc.

Besides, I had power from a solar charger on my camper - so when the batteries became exhausted - I tossed another in from the camper all charged and ready to go.

Creativity is a great idea round about Day Three of cooking over an open grill - and going out to the back yard to chip out your next frozen dinner from the ice.”

As a follow-up to my column on tracking time using QuickBooks, a reader offered her own take on keeping up with projects:

“I assign projects a label color in my Microsoft Outlook Calendar.  I have my calendar display 15-minute segments, and click on the calendar and assign a label color when I start on work on a project. When I finish, I just drag the appointment down to show how much time I worked on it.  When it comes time to invoice, I have a very graphic way of seeing time spent on different projects. 

"When there is something unusual about the work, I can drag and drop relevant e-mail right into the appointment so I have a record of why something was done.  And for general management of the e-mail trails, each client has a folder, and those client folders contain subfolders that are organized by objectives, and then by projects (for example, the objective might be ‘Ensure all collateral and Web sites are up to date’ and the project folders are ‘Web site errata’, ‘New collateral requests’ and ‘Print collateral updates’).”

Regarding my tax time column, one reader said he remains loyal to do-it-yourself software like TurboTax.

Now that you have the basics from H&R, “next year you can buy TurboTax Premier and save yourself over $300. You should join a group like the Independent Computer Consultants Association (ICCA) and you would learn all that and a lot more.”