What does every Tablet PC owner who presents in public or teaches want, that PowerPoint can’t do?

Ink in presenter mode.

I.e. you want to be able to see the current slide and its notes and its context all at once, and you want to be able to ink. Because if you can’t ink on the slides, what good is your Tablet PC in teaching? You might as well have an everyday laptop.

First you need to know the hidden PowerPoint trick. At least no one I have ever known, except for Olga who discovered it and showed it to me, knew about this. Are academics just hopelessly behind corporate types in their PowerPoint skills? Anyway, you can present your slides with the projector considered as a second monitor, not just cloning what you see on the Tablet. I’m sure you already know to right-click on the desktop, select Properties, then select the "Settings" tab and extend your desktop onto a second monitor. When your Tablet is docked, it’s your external monitor. In a presentation, it’s the projector.

Now in PowerPoint you go to Slide Show/Set up Show… and under Multiple Monitors, check the box for Show Presenter View. If you already have the second monitor enabled (as per above) and your screen extended there, you’re set; if not, it will prompt you to do that at this point. Now when you go to project your show, you can see your current slide, your notes, and a filmstrip of your slides for context etc.

Hard to believe you’ve been using PowerPoint so long without knowing that was there, eh? But that’s not the main point here. At this point, you’ve noticed you can’t ink on your slides, so you give up and go back to the old system, which probably involves having a paper print-out of your slides for context. Crazy! Crazy Wrong!

See the long discussion at TabletPCBuzz.

It turns out that Classroom Presenter from the University of Washington lets you do what you want to do. Yay!

I could write one of those funny posts about how horrendous the documentation is. Take a look here at the quick start guide to get the gist of it. (I do hope that link becomes obsolete soon!)

But let me be practical, and cut straight to the goods, and give you the quick start guide. This is assuming that you are into it for the inking, and not for the elaborate system of instant classroom feedback, which requires a whole room full of happy TC1100-using students, because of course you can’t get the TC1100 any more, even if your institution could afford to equip a whole room with them.

So install your Classroom Presenter that you have downloaded from above, and enable your second monitor display (your projector is second monitor as with Presenter Mode in PowerPoint), open your ppt slide deck that you’ve already converted to a csd deck (because those instructions are more or less clear). And here’s the magic step you are hard-pressed to find in the documentation: in your Classroom Presenter, go to Tools/Properties and select the "Display" tab (of course!) and check the box for "Enable Dual-Monitor Output."

I guess if you have flashy slides with animation etc, it doesn’t work so well. (That’s supposed to be a lo-tech frown, but something  here in WordPress converts it to a hi-tech frown.) "Try not using images!" That’s practical advice! Just give me back my blackboard if that’s where it’s come to.

 

 

Paris

A few days before I left for France I posted a question on the Tablet PC
Buzz asing how I could work best in Paris on my email and documents given
that my TC1100 had to go into HP repair. Well this is how things got
resolved.

I purchased a 4gb verbatim flash drive. I wasn’t looking for any kind of
self contained operating system but it came with Ceedo. James Kendrick
suggested I use Migo but since the flashdrive came with Ceedo I thought I
give it a try. Well, overall it wasn’t that great. I can see the
potential though.

First of all there seems to be a problem when I plug the verbatim in the usb slot and run Ceedo on a tablet PC. This is the error message that comes up ("to open TCServer.exe under Ceedo, all other TCServer processes must be closed"):

 
When I plugged it in to a non-tablet pc this error message does not occur.  

So how was I able to manage all my work email? Well since I was meeting
Lynette and her TC1100 in Paris, she agreed to let me use it while I
stayed in France. She left Paris for Montreal last week sans Tablet PC, a
strange thing indeed. I put all my working documents on her Tablet and
also created an additional account in Outlook and was therefore able to
access all my email and write new ones with abandon (thank to mostly free wireless generously donated by the French).

Lynette’s TC1100 will be returned to her when we meet each other at the
Montreal airport tomorrow and board the same flight to Halifax. I suspect
that she’ll be eager to put her hands on the TC1100. All in all, let’s be
very clear: leaving me with her tc1100 for over a week was the ultimate
sacrific and I am grateful for that! Would you hand over your tablet for
a week without having access to any alternative except perhaps webmail (yikes!)?

So no Ceedo and Verbatim did not help sufficiently though I did need a
new flashdrive. I think Ceedo does have potential but it would need to be
able to run Office and Outlook without a hitch. I also posted a question
on the Ceedo forum asking them about the tsc server issue. I had hoped
for some response from Ceedo support but nothing was forthcoming before I left for France and I just checked the form website and no rsponse has been posted. Not sure if Ceedo understands the importance of customer relations.

What Ceedo looks like when you want to remove the flash drive:

Check out more on Ceedo by reading today’s article by NYT’s David Pogue.

And as to my TC1100, I received an email from work yesterday that my
TC1100 has been ruturned. And repaired, I presume. Yay!

Looks like a nice and very much improved feature in Vista. It seems you do not need to train the software recognition software as much as previous versions or other software. Microsoft has released a worthwhile clip here for you to watch. The speech recognition feature provides a tablet user like myself more choices for inputting data. I am not the greatest slate user when it comes to inputting text and this will give me another option. You can also do additional activities like surfing around and more. This really looks like a piece of cake and an exciting new feature.

About two weeks ago I reformatted my hard drive, reinstalled Windows XP Tablet Edition on my HP TC1100 (1 Ghz, 1 gig of Ram) and loaded MS Office 12 Beta. Here are some initial observations. As you will see, nothing you will find here is new since Microsoft bloggers have worked hard to keep us up to date with many visuals & words:

OneNote (Owen Brown)

OneNote (Chris Pratley on the user-oriented view of OneNote) 

Outlook (Michael Affronti)

Outlook (Will Kennedy on the super feast new search feature in Outlook (and it IS really fast!) 

Outlook (Melissa MacBeth on Tasks and Time Management in Outlook– I LOVE the new ToDo bars and the Navigation Panes– perfect for the screen limited Tablet PC users) 

Office (Jensen Harris on the snazzy new interface of Office)

Excel (David Gainer on what is new in Excel) 

video at Channel 9 on new UI for Office 12 

Microsoft on the new UI for Office 12 

For the past 2 weeks I have been using Outlook 12, Word 12, Excel 12, PowerPoint 12, and OneNote 12 as my primary programmes on my tablet pc, both for work and other purposes. 

Installing and a new found love

Any glaring problems with installing? The only 2 immediate issues at hand for me were that I had to uninstall two add-ins for Outlook from both MindManager as well as Adobe Pro 7. Both mindManager and Adobe work fine otherwise. I can live with this as I don’t use these features much and I am really thrilled with many of the new features in this Beta version. In order words the benefits of installing Office outweighs the harms. Though, of course, I am fully aware that this is a beta version and snags could come along the way.

The most obvious newness about Office is the retooled user interface. It’s sleek and feature rich and I like the blueish colour in Word. I love, love, love, love the new ‘Ribbon’ that most of the Office programmes will have. Jensen Harris of Microsoft refers to the Ribbon as "a strip across the top of the window that exposes what the program can do." I appreciate this feature because I really did not enjoy the constant playing and futzing around on my Tablet with all the moving Office tool bars. The bars would not ’sit still’ and as a visual person I really like to see as many of my features as possible yet having things look organized. This became even more annoying on my Tablet PC when rotating from landscape to portrait and back. I have wasted many a minute to fix the toolbars so that I am less distracted. Of course, I could have choosen to leave the toolbars messy in Word 2003 but that would require more psychological energy than fixing them!

I should note that not all Office programmes will get the new Ribbon look. Go to this post by Jensen Harris for the who and why.

What I like the best so far

In the past few years I have used MS Outlook email with no problems. I always found the calendar, appointments and tasks quite a hassle to use to the point that I became an inconsistent user of those features. Why? I really had to mouse and click around to get a sense of what the tasks were, my emails and appointments. The UI in Outlook now brings together in one screen, e-mail, tasks, and appointments. This is hot! Now I don’t have to flip back and forth to find this appointment or write this email. I can stay in the same screen view much longer than before. And what is nice for people who use Tablet PC’s and have less than say 17 inch flat panels, the tool and task bars can be set up in such a way that even with my 10 incher tablet pc, I can view it all at a glance!

 

The picture above of Outlook shows you how my email navigation pane is on the left. I could choose to have all my Outlook folders showing but I like this better. I can set up the navigation pane which allows me to only show my favourite folders, in other words I can choose to only see incoming email from those I have designated as favourites. I really like this because it reduces the distracting emails. I can look at them later when I wish to do so and all I have to do is click on the navigation pane. Note the picture is a bit scrunched up so even on my TC1100 I do get to see way more than is currently showing. 

Note that in Outlook email there is a grab and drag feature (see more below). While the ribbon feature is present in Outlook it is not immediately obvious until you start writing emails.

Also the new search feature in Outlook is super fast and handy. I had to find some email  today from 2002 and found it it no time. The old Outlook search feature was painfull in comparison! Yay! 

To Do Bar

I love the To Do Bar in Outlook 12. Again, it’s because Outlook now allows for a single page view of email, tasks and appointments. Appointments are clearly shown and lots of colours to choose from. Tasks are also integrated into the Outlook single view.  It is great to stay on the same view and quickly add tasks. It’s all about integration and a single view. When I use a docking station at work, I use the flat panel for Word or Firefox, etc and the docked tablet is set to my outlook. A small glance from my ever watchful right eye sees all that I need to know.

Grab and drag

I have written previsouly here and here how much I love the grab and drag Firefox extension. Why? When I surf around on the web I am usually in slate mode and control of web pages is higher with grab and drag than with trying to find the side bar constantly. It just feels like a more natural way of moving around on the screen. Smooth and intimate. Of course only a Tablet PC allows for such qualities. In one of these earlier posts I wished for the grab and drag feature in MS Word. Well my wish has come through! Yay! And not only in Word but also in Outlook. Though it will probably be more useful in Word because of reading papers and other documents. I have always disliked reading Word docs on the screen because of the difficulty I have navigating around using the side bar. Yes there are some other features currently to help you navigate but grab and drag is a superior solution for me. The picture below shows you the Ribbon style in Word.

 

 

Inking

The picture above shows you what the inking features look like at a glance in Word. While I am not entirely sure I have a feeling that some of the inking features in Word will be expanded. As of now, there are way way more colours to choose from and you can more easier choose the weight of the lines. Also it is possible to stay in grab and drag mode while making comments in the beta Word version. Nothing much else to report on inking so far but that could be because I haven’t noticed it. The same goes with Outlook. The basic inking features now available in Outlook 2003 are similar in this Beta version. I really do hope that some major refinements will be made. I have not really been happy with the inking capabilities in either Word 2003 or the Beta. I know they can be better.

Regardless of some of my complaints, I am very excited about Office 12 so far. I know it will really make a difference in my work.

As an aside, while I have been eager to try out Inkgestures in the Office Beta version, it does not seem to show up anywhere on the toolbar. 

In the near future I’ll have a write up on OneNote 12.

After our podcast with James Kendrick and March Orchant, Michael Scherotter (Business Solutions Architect) from Mindjet dropped by and wrote a couple of words on Tabletology.com. During our podcast we were explaining how we wished we could pen all over our mindmaps. Currently, penning all over the map is impossible and, from our vantage point, something that really needs to be integrated into MindManager. We hope this is possible in future versions. When the new version of Mindmanager was recently released (along with Mindjet’s nice new logo) we were surprised that the entire Mindmapping canvas was not inking sensitive.

This reminded us a bit of how few robust inking capabilities are integrated into Adobe Acrobat. This had always baffled us because PDFs are perfect for inking! This gaping hole by Adobe has left the door open for software like PDF Annotator. I have used PDF Annotator on and off and have wrestled between the shortcomings in both PDF Annotator and Adobe Acrobat. We wrote a little review of it here.

Back to MindManager. Michael Scherotter from Mindjet dropped by to let Tabletology know about a plugin for MindManager where you can export a mindmap into Microsoft OneNote. This is a good start,  though for now this is obviously a workaround for having the entire MindMapping canvas inking sensitive. 

I tried to export 2 mindmaps I have been working on to OneNote and have mixed results. The first map (see below) worked fine. The map was successully exported into OneNote. I can now draw all over it. Of course if I want to make changes to my original mindmap I will have to switch back and forth between MindManager and OneNote.

Then I tried to export another map I have been working on. It is a large map and while I tried to adjust the zoom function, as you can see from the photo it produced a fuzzy non-workable OneNote page. This is too bad. Does anyone know whether there is a workaround for this? Do let us know.

Download the OneNote MindManger plug-in here and let us know your experiences. 

We have some other wishes for MindManager which we’ll write about in future posts.