Happy to keep taking the tablets
By Rob
O'Neill
July 26, 2005
Gordon Cahill
with his notepad.
Photo: Sahlan Hayes
A tablet PC was not on Gordon Cahill's shopping list. But when he found a
cheap ex-demo model he decided to give it a go - a purchase he doesn't regret.
"I had heard of tablets but
never seen or used one," he says. "Fourteen months later and I will
never buy a regular laptop again. My next PC will be a pure slate tablet
PC."
Mr Cahill has two full-time jobs, one as a
wedding photographer and another as national customer service manager for an
importer of scuba-diving gear.
For the photographic work he
tends to use a more powerful, but desk-bound, PC to process images. In his
other role - very much about sales and problem-solving - he uses his Acer tablet
in slate mode every day. At the start of his day he uses the tablet in notebook
PC mode, as it is easier to answer emails with a keyboard. Then he will switch
to slate mode and use Microsoft One Note.
"Using OneNote and the web,
I Google for the information I want," he says. "When I find a page I
want to keep, I use a non-Microsoft plug-in to 'print' the webpage into
OneNote."
This virtual printer converts the
webpage to a OneNote page and loads it into the
program. Using the pen, Mr Cahill can highlight
important points and scribble ink notes directly on to the OneNote page. He can
then file the page.
"Not only is my data all in
one place, I can also search either the typewritten or ink text," he says.
"Try doing that with a pile of paper notebooks."
Mr Cahill says he answers a lot of phone
calls where he has to chase something up and get back to a client. "In
slate mode, I can jot notes straight onto my tablet desktop using a program
called OrangeGuava, which loads at start-up. No more
scraps of paper or Post-It notes."
Mr Cahill is organising
a meeting to oppose a "diving tax" to fund research into the grey
nurse shark but his company's premises are in a new area that doesn't show up
on whereis.com.au. With his tablet, he copies a
street map from the web, "prints" it into OneNote and draws in the
missing details. He can then email this file directly from OneNote to clients.
On the photographic side, Mr Cahill uses Outlook and an ink plug-in called Tablet
Enhancements for Outlook to open an appointment on the date of a client's
wedding.
"TEO allows you to enter ink
appointments, contacts, journal entries and tasks. I need two hands to type but
with TEO I can write in the customer details and record any notes on our
conversation that I think I will need later with the phone in my other
hand."
Where most people use paper, Mr Cahill uses his tablet.
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