Tablet PCs are powerful, light-weight, portable computers that combine many of the features of a standard laptop with those of a personal digital assistant like a Palm handheld. While Tablet PCs are often seen as fancy tools for doctors, lawyers, and other high-paid information workers, one of their best uses is a low-tech activity that almost everyone does – taking notes. While at first, it sounds crazy to replace pencil and paper with a comparatively expensive, heavy, fragile, battery-powered Tablet PC, it really isn’t.
Researchers have reported that almost everyone takes notes. They do it at work, in school, around the house, in the mall, even while talking on the phone. Why? To record important bits of information that they won’t remember if they don’t write it down.
But you already know where this is going. They record all this important information in notebooks, scribble it on napkins, jot it down on the palms of their hands, somehow get it written down. Then they lose whatever it is they wrote the notes on. They throw away the old napkin, wash their hands, or misplace the notebook containing the information they need.
Even if they don’t physically lose the information, they can’t make good use of it. Finding the right piece of information among all your notes can be like finding a needle in a haystack. There’s no way to easily organize or search all the notes we take. It is usually too much work to find a specific piece of information among all the notes people accumulate.
For a growing number of people, the answer is to give up on pencil and paper and use a Tablet PC instead. While a Tablet PC costs probably 100 times as much as a stack of paper notebooks and pencils, it addresses the main problems of taking notes on paper. Tablet PCs come with a note-taking program called Windows Journal. Using Windows Journal and a stylus (usually just called a pen), you can take as many notes as you wish and not worry about losing them since they’re all inside your Tablet PC. And because the Tablet PC indexes the contents of your documents, you can actually search for information in your notes with a reasonable chance of finding it.
Soon, it will be even easier to store and search your notes on a Tablet PC. Later this year, Microsoft will introduce OneNote, a new note management program. You can use OneNote on regular PCs, but it is clearly designed for Tablet PCs.
Windows Journal works like an infinite pad of paper, while OneNote works like a virtually infinite notebook. With OneNote, you can store notes in an almost unlimited number of sections, with an almost unlimited number of pages in each section. OneNote will be a great place to store all the kinds of information you used to include in paper notes. OneNote can also hold information from web pages or snippets of other documents, the kind of things that are hard to deal with using traditional handwritten notes on paper
Within the next few years, Tablet PCs will become lighter, less expensive, sturdier, and will be able to run all day on a charge. Then we’ll all get used to seeing people handwriting their notes on the screen of a Tablet PC, instead of a piece of paper.
Bill Mann writes regularly about mobile technology and is author of “How to Do Everything with Your Tablet PC,” McGraw-Hill, 2003. For more information on Tablet PCs and what they can do for you, visit Bill’s website at http://tabletpc.techforyou.com.
