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Outlook
2003: Designed with the Tablet PC in Mind
By Bill Mann
Microsoft
Office Outlook 2003 is the version of Outlook in the soon-to-be-released
version of Microsoft Office. The new version of Office, formally known
as Microsoft Office System 2003 (a.k.a. Office 11) includes many changes
and enhancements to the other core Office applications (Word, Excel, and
PowerPoint), but none has been reworked as thoroughly as Outlook 2003.
I've been working with Outlook 2003 betas for months now as I write my
next book, "How to Do Everything with Outlook 2003" (Osborne/McGraw-Hill,
Fall 2003) and I'm happy to say that many of the changes to Outlook 2003
are designed with Tablet PCs in mind.
I'm not going
to give you the full story on Outlook 2003 here, but here are some of
the new features that I've found to be particularly cool for Tablet PC
users:
· Ink support.
Outlook 2003 supports digital ink. You can use handwriting recognition
with Outlook, enter annotations with ink, and send handwritten e-mail
messages. To get the full power of ink in Outlook, you need to use Word
as your e-mail editor, but even that isn't as big an issue as it was in
the past. Microsoft has simplified the use of Word as your Outlook e-mail
editor, and the two applications play together nicely.
· Pen-friendly
Interface. Outlook 2003's Navigation pane includes large buttons (they
look like bars across the bottom of the pane) for selecting Mail, Calendar,
and other views. These big buttons are easy to tap with the pen. You can
also select large, easily-tapped icons for your toolbars. These are nice
touches that show the engineers developing Outlook had us pen-users in
mind when they did their work.
· Here's
something really slick. I don't know about you, but I tend to use my Tablet
PC in portrait mode sometimes, and in landscape mode at other times. The
new Outlook interface is designed for landscape mode displays, since the
vast majority of computer displays are oriented that way. But Outlook
recognizes when you change to a portrait mode screen orientation changes
and automatically reconfigures itself to make the most efficient use of
the tall thin screen.
· Better
Connection Management. If you normally connect to a Microsoft Exchange
server for your e-mail, you'll like this one. Remember the last time you
lost the connection to Exchange while Outlook was up and running? If you
were lucky, Outlook threw up some error messages then sat and waited until
Exchange was available again. If you weren't lucky, Outlook went down
and took your whole computer with it. No more. Outlook 2003 works in something
called Cached Exchange Mode. In Cached Exchange Mode, Outlook recognizes
the kind of connection you have to the Exchange server (even if that means
no connection at all) and deals with it. When your machine is connected,
Outlook pulls down information from the server and stores it on your hard
drive. That way, you can always work from the latest version of your information
that's stored on the hard drive, even if you have no connection at all.
Further, Outlook automatically changes the way it works to match the bandwidth
of the available connection. Cached Exchange Mode is perfect for Tablet
PCs, since we tend to just grab them and go, moving from place to place
with no warning, and needing to take advantage of whatever connection
happens to be available at any time.
The addition
of features like these to Outlook 2003 makes it clear to me that Microsoft
plans to take care of us Tablet PC users.
A Request
for Help:
In response
to my story on using the Sound Recorder, one of our readers asked about
sound recorders that can record more than the 30 seconds at a shot that
the Sound Recorder does. He found one solution in an old copy of "Ahead
Nero," a CD-ROM burning program that has a built-in audio recorder, which
he says works great.
Does anyone
else have a suggestion for a sound recorder that works well on a Tablet
PC and can record long sound segments?
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