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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. http://www.articlealley.com/ Bill Mann writes regularly about mobile technology and is
author of the book, “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.