Archive for the ‘101 Things You Could Do With A Tablet PC’ Category

Tablet PCs are great tools of education. Students use tablet PCs for things like taking notes, getting organised and composing music. And thanks to Microsoft’s Windows XP Tablet PC power toys, students can experiment with Newton’s laws too.

From the Tablet PC power toys page:

Bring your drawings to life with the Physics Illustrator, a motion simulator for the Tablet PC. Simply draw two-dimensional bodies, connect them in various ways, and apply forces, then watch as animation makes the bodies move, collide, and interact.

The Tablet PC physics tool is hours of fun, and you might just learn something too!

Dealing with email overload is one of the greatest challenges in running a business. Often, many of the emails that flood your inbox are internal communications that need a quick response.

Email - meet Tablet PC

With a Tablet PC and Office 2007 (or Office 2003) you can send email in handwriting. That enables you to send emails from places like:

• An airport lounge
• A doctors waiting room
• A cafe over coffee

Tablet PCs allow you to maximise your working time by enabling you to use a fully functional PC in places where you generally wouldn’t use a laptop.

Brush up your handwriting skills, because you’re going to need them again. Tablet PCs are great productivity tools.

Ever tried to use your laptop on a domestic flight in economy? It’s tricky.

Because a laptop screen hinges at the back, you need more at least 50cm of room just to open the laptop and tilt the screen to an angle that you can see. Then you need some extra space so that you can reach the keyboard.

It all adds up to bad ergonomics, RSI and neck strain!

With a Tablet PC however, you can work comfortably on even the most cramped budget flights.

Because you work on and over the Tablet screen, you only need about 30cm of space to work comfortably.

The Motion Computing CE 1700 clip on keyboard has the advantage of being centrally mounted which means that you can also use it in laptop mode with a keyboard in a more cramped space than a laptop would allow.

It’s great to be able to use that time when you’re stuck at 40,000 feet to get ahead on emails! In fact, I wrote this blog entry high above Canberra on the way back from CeBit in Sydney today.

Are you lugging around an A4 notepad and pen in that portfolio of yours?

There are so many places where Tablet PC is practical and a laptop just isn’t. Meetings with your clients are a perfect example.

You wouldn’t generally use a laptop in a round table meeting because the laptop screen creates a barrier between you and the client. Your clients also can’t see the screen, so they will be suspicious about what you’re doing in there…

If you place your Tablet PC flat on the table, there is no screen barrier and your clients can see the notes that you’re taking.

Also, when you get a Tablet PC, you will be showing a more impressive front to your clients. That’s because when you go into any meeting with a Tablet PC you will look more:

• Professional
• Impressive
• Technically superior
• Organised.

But the real kicker is that you can actually be all that!

A Tablet PC will allow you to:

• Never lose a note again
• Search through your handwritten notes
• Email handwritten notes
• Mark and action notes for follow up
• Audio record the conversation in sync with you handwritten notes.

It’s perfect for meetings, especially with clients.

Windows Vista has a brilliant feature for Tablet PC users called gestures or Pen Flicks. You can program gestures to do things that you would commonly do on your PC, like scroll up, scroll down, undo, cut, copy, paste and delete.

Gestures make a lot of sense on a Tablet PC because a pen is so much easier to use than a mouse.

You can program the sensitivity of Vista’s gestures, as well as the actual commands that the gestures trigger. There is even a neat practice tool to help you to get going.

Like the scrolling mouse wheel, once you’ve used Windows Vista gestures, you will find it hard to live without!

Watch a full demonstration of the Windows Vista Gesture tool below thanks to www.gottabemobile.com.

With a Tablet PC you can turn your handwriting into computer text… or not, the choice is yours.

If you’ve ever used handwriting recognition on a PDA or Palm Pilot, you’ll know that it can be a tedious affair. Tablet PCs hare a far superior system of handwriting recognition that takes advantage of their computing power.

The Tablet PC input panel allows you to write multiple lines of text, suggesting and correcting as you go. It is a very quick and accurate input method, and it’s even better now in Windows Vista.

But one of the real beauties of Tablet PC is that you don’t have to bother with handwriting recognition if you don’t want to. Programs like Microsoft OneNote and Journal allow you to leave your notes in handwriting and convert them to text later. In fact, OneNote recognises your handwriting automatically and stores a copy in the background as searchable text.

Mind Mapping works better on a Tablet PC than on a desktop PC or laptop. Mind Mapping is a creative process that is used for capturing ideas, thoughts and concepts and organising them logically. It can also be used as a note-taking method and a memory aid.

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.
Source: Wikipedia

It’s often a process that involves discussion and brainstorming. Because Mind Mapping is a creative process it flows better in your handwriting.

There are several Mind Mapping software packages available that bring Mind Mapping to your PC. Mind Manager from Mindjet allows you to work in Ink on that Tablet PC. The ability to create a map in digital ink with your own hand means Mind Mapping that just works better on a Tablet PC.

Already a Tablet PC user? Click here to download a free trial of Mind Manager.

If you work with forms, then you probably need to get them signed too.

Tablet PCs are often used for getting signatures in real estate and  mortgage broking. In fact, any company that uses contracts can benefit from Tablet PCs.

A Tablet PC is the simplest way to capture and store digital ink signatures. There are 3 really easy ways to capture signatures with a Tablet PC right out of the box:

1. Create a digital version of your paper form with Windows Journal and the signature on that (easiest for everyone)
2. Simply embed a digital ink field into your windows based application that stores the signature to your database (easy for programmer)
3. Use the specialist digital ink signature control capabilities to capture and encrypt signatures (not too hard for programmer)

Microsoft has a step by step guide for software developers here.

In the course of your day to day business, there are many things that you might need to sketch or draw. 

Here are some reasons that you might want to draw something on your Tablet PC:

• Artists - create digital art on screen with a pen
• Graphic designers - create a sketch concept and share it quickly with your client
• Construction contractors - Create a sketch for your quote and pass it on to your team
• Engineers - Mark up plans on site in AutoCAD
• Insurance assessors - Annotate images and notes of damage
• Bored travellers - Doodle on the train or plane.

Of course drawing preceded writing as the earliest means of visual communication, and they do say that a picture is worth a thousand words. 

There are just so many things that you can’t put in words. But at least with a Tablet PC you can draw them without paper!

Most businesses have forms that need to be filled out.

• Sales orders
• Quotes
• Purchase agreements
• Purchase orders
• Credit applications
• Staff appraisals
• Status reports
• Condition reports
• Job sheets
• The list goes on…

The trouble with paper forms is that once you use them the information is stuck on the paper. Now to do anything with that form you will have to:

• Retrieve the form
• Store the form
• Print the form
• Scan the form.

There are a number of problems with that. Forms go missing and get lost, forms get coffee spilled on them, forms get up and walk around on their own.

A Tablet PC can instantly eliminate all of that with the simplest click of an icon. It goes like this:

1. Take out your Tablet PC
2. Open the form in question
3. Click print
4. Select “Journal Note Writer”
5. Give your file a name
6. Now you have an electronic version of your form.

You can then save your Windows Journal note as a template and use it over and over again.

Now if you want to, you can:

1. Email it to anyone
2. Save it in the client’s folder on you network
3. Attach it to your CRM record
4. Convert the handwriting to text

Windows Journal is free and installed on your Tablet PC out of the box. There’s also a free Journal Viewer for non-tablet PC users.