TABLET PC POWER
Tablet PC and Outlook 2003 make a great team
By Bill Mann
The latest version of Outlook is about to arrive, and it has a lot to offer for all us Tablet PC users. Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 has been significantly redesigned to make us more efficient and productive at handling the flood of email and other information flowing through our lives.
While there are plenty of improvements in Outlook 2003 that affect all users, Microsoft didn't forget about Tablet PC users. As I've worked with the various Outlook betas on my Acer Travelmate C100 Tablet PC, I've found a number of features to be particularly useful. In this short article, I'll go over some of my favorites.
Ink support
Outlook 2003 (and all the other applications in Office System 2003) supports digital ink. Digital ink is particularly powerful if you use Word 2003 as your email editor. With this combination, you can add handwritten annotations to email messages, even send handwritten mail, as shown in Figure A.
FIGURE A
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Handwritten email adds a personal touch to your messages. Click picture for a larger image.
Fortunately, Microsoft has made using Word as your email editor more pleasant than it was in the past. They've streamlined the way Word works with Outlook, and I haven't seen any of the Word/Outlook integration problems that plagued earlier versions.
A pen-friendly interface
The Outlook 2003 Navigation Pane includes large buttons for switching between the views. The buttons look like bars across the bottom of the Navigation Pane, and their large size makes them easy to tap with the pen. You can also set Outlook to use large (I mean really large) toolbar icons, which are easy to hit with the pen.
Automatic adaptation to screen mode
The Outlook 2003 interface was clearly designed for landscape mode displays, which suits the vast majority of Outlook users just fine, since almost all desktop and notebook computer displays are landscape mode. But that's not the case for Tablet PCs. If you're like me, you tend to use your Tablet PC in both portrait and landscape modes.
This could have been a real pain in the neck for anyone who wants to use Outlook in each mode without headaches. Thanks to smart design work, Outlook recognizes when you change screen modes and automatically reconfigures itself to make the most efficient use of the tall thin screen of portrait mode, as shown in Figure B.
FIGURE B
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Outlook 2003 adapts to the tall, thin screen of portrait mode. Click picture for a larger image.
You can also see how Outlook 2003 takes advantage of the short wide screen of landscape mode in Figure C.
FIGURE C
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Outlook 2003 in appears here in its usual landscape mode. Click picture for a larger image.
Intelligent Connection Management
Outlook 2003 supports something called Cached Exchange Mode. In Cached Exchange Mode (which requires Exchange Server 2003), Outlook recognizes the kind of connection you have to the Exchange server (even if that means no connection at all) and automatically adapts its behavior to the characteristics of the connection.
When you have a good connection, Outlook pulls down information from the server and stores it on your hard drive. It then works from that information, and synchronizes itself with Exchange whenever it can. This means you always have a reasonably current version of your Outlook information to work from, even if you have no connection to the server at all.
Cached Exchange Mode is perfect for Tablet PC users, since we're always moving our machines from place to place with no warning, and we need to be able to take advantage of whatever connection happens to be available wherever we are.
Bill Mann is a contributing editor for Computing Unplugged and the author of "How to Do Everything with Your Tablet PC" and "How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office Outlook 2003," both published by Osborne/McGraw-Hill.
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