James makes an excellent point. Tablet PC is not for everyone.

I believe that Pen and paper can be as productive as tablet pc. Tablet pc is just can be effective also. Say, Warren Buffet never has a computer on his desk and use only a telephone for his lifetime, never a cellphone, not to say a Treo. Look at the Wallstreet people carrying the blackberry but never achieve Mr. Buffet lengendary status.

Now we look at Bill Gate and his pal Steve Ballmer and of course Steve Job. They are high tech users. Bill Gate uses tablet pc for his work and he certainly makes his office very cool and clean as opposed to Mr. Gore. Steve Ballmer loves to carrry a laptop to his conference meeting. They are the the frontier of technologies and they are the movers.

All these people are highly accomplished beings in financial sense. Yet, they use different tools and different methods. Forget which tool is effective and which tool is not. It only matters when you love using a tablet pc, you will eventually maximizes its use. When you use paper and pen, you can also maximize its uses. Personally, I love tablet pc and I will continue to use it not because it is more productive, effective or cheaper. I use it because I love tablet pc!

Don’t you just hate it when those who extol the virtues of simple pen and paper as opposed to inking on a tablet, whip out a Waterman fountain pen and a Moleskine notebook to prove their point?

One major gripe I have with my tablet is that, after all this time, there’s still no recognizer pack for my native language (portuguese). This seriously impairs the tablet experience, although it is still a magnificent work tool.

Can you english-speaking guys imagine what it would be like to use your tablet with a reduced inking experience (e.g. no search for handwriting in OneNote, no TIP with ink – only tap-keyboard, etc.)?

I hate to cross-post, but I also respond poorly to criticism of my favored form factor (and its users), so here’s my take: whether words are written on paper or typed using a manual typewriter, the advantages (and disadvantages) of paper remain the same. Just swap some words and the whole piece turns into a slam against notebooks and praise for manual typewriters.

I’m the one who wrote that article. You are right – I shouldn’t condemn all tablet pc users and visit this site very often. My writing tends to be very sarcastic. But seriously…I have not found a tablet I liked yet. The Fujitsu T4215 has come awfully close though.

Chris, since you don’t have OneNote (yet), you should also be aware that ink in Windows Journal documents is searchable via the search function in Windows Explorer, same as searching text in other documents. Not nearly as speedy as searching in OneNote, but it works.

I can easily imagine frustration driving Dayrl back to the pen. I have been using a treo running a self written (Handbase database) time tracking program as my point-of-sale system for about 4 years now and all the while I am looking for a tablet PC so I can convert to Access and to step up a notch.

I really would like some help finding the perfect fit and can see how Dayrl might have become turned off by a product that did not have a better match to his style of useage, especially if he made a leap bought something that was not a good fit and then returned it out of frustration.

Only good ideas get this kind of derision lately. Sigh.

I don’t have OneNote at the moment, but I’m seriously impressed. Thanks for taking the time to reply James, I think I’ll take at the software.

Chris, I should also point out that when I bring images like photos into OneNote then any text within that image becomes searchable too. So if I take a photo with my camera phone of a document, then have OneNote Mobile automatically sync it to my Tablet OneNote, all the text within that photo is then searchable. Very powerful stuff.

Chris, I use OneNote 2007 for taking all my notes. The search function in OneNote is very good at finding whatever search term I give it. It returns every inked instance of the search term, either within the page, the section, the notebook or across all of my notebooks. Returned search results are highlighted in yellow when it’s displayed. You can also select for OneNote to put all of the returned results in a long list and instantly go to the particular page where each term was found.

James, could you go through the method of how you search for notes in your own handwriting please?