2. Tablet PC: A New Approach To Office Computing

I've been using a Toshiba M200 Tablet PC for the last year or so. When I first heard about Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, I was very skeptical. The idea of writing on something other than paper and expecting a computer to readily interpret my chicken scratching seemed absurd. Then a friend who is a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) showed me his Toshiba M200 and the many ways he used it to get work done, I investigated Tablet PC further. A month later I bought my own.

What I find most useful about Tablet PC is the way you can do almost all of your work with a stylus. This includes everything from entering and saving handwritten documents in graphical form to browsing the Internet and playing games. When I started using my Toshiba M200, I tended to handwrite, but then I put my handwriting through Tablet PC's very good optical character recognition (OCR) program so I could use what I had written in programs like Word. I subsequently realized that a lot of handwritten documents worked better in their original form, especially those with drawings or extensive handwritten mark ups.

I learned to use Tablet PC's Windows Journal to prepare and manage handwritten and OCR notes. Don't confuse Windows Journal with Microsoft Outlook's Journal component. Windows Journal is new with the Tablet PC OS. The following screen captures show Windows Journal in action on the Fujitsu P1510D.

Windows Journal is geared toward managing notes in both handwritten and text format.

Notice the notes manager near the top of the Windows Journal. You open a note simply by selecting it with the stylus. My first note has a standard electronic text title; the title of the second is hand written.