Why You Should Replace Paper Notes with a Tablet PC

Why You Should Replace Paper Notes with a Tablet PCBy Bill MannTablet PCs are powerful, light-weight, portable computersthat combine many of the features of a standard laptop withthose 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 isalow-tech activity that almost everyonedoes - taking notes. While at first, it sounds crazy toreplace 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 themall, even while talking on the phone. Why? To recordimportant bits of information that they won't remember ifthey don't write it down.But you already know where this is going. They record allthis important information in notebooks, scribble it onnapkins, jot it down on the palms of their hands, somehowget it written down. Then they lose whatever it is theywrote the notes on. They throw away the old napkin, washtheir hands, or misplace the notebook containing theinformation they need.Even if they don't physically lose the information, theycan't make good use of it. Finding the right piece ofinformation among all your notes can be like finding aneedle in a haystack. There's no way to easily organizeor search all the notes we take. It is usually too muchwork to find a specific piece of information among allthe notes people accumulate.For a growing number of people, the answer is to give upon pencil and paper and use a Tablet PC instead. While aTabletPC costs probably 100 times as much as a stack of papernotebooks and pencils, it addresses the main problems oftaking notes on paper. Tablet PCs come with a note-takingprogram called Windows Journal. Using Windows Journal anda stylus (usually just called a pen), you can take asmany notes as you wish and not worry about losing themsince they're all inside your Tablet PC. And because theTablet PC indexes the contents of your documents, you canactually search for information in your notes with areasonable chance of finding it.Soon, it will be even easier to store and search yournotes on a Tablet PC. Later this year, Microsoft willintroduce OneNote, a new note management program. You canuse OneNote on regular PCs, but it is clearly designedfor 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 unlimitednumber of sections, with an almost unlimited number ofpages in each section. OneNote will be a great place tostore all the kinds of information you used to include inpaper notes. OneNote can also hold information from webpages or snippets of other documents, the kind of thingsthat are hard to deal with using traditional handwrittennotes on paperWithin the next few years, Tablet PCs will become lighter,less expensive, sturdier, and will be able to run all dayon a charge. Then we'll all get used to seeing peoplehandwriting their notes on the screen of a Tablet PC,instead of a piece of paper.Resource BoxBill Mann writes regularly about mobile technology and isauthor of the book, "How to Do Everything with YourTablet PC," McGraw-Hill, 2003. For more information onTablet PCs and what they can do for you, visit Bill'swebsite at http://tabletpc.techforyou.com.[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

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