Brainstorming with Digital Ink!

Digital Ink

Why Digital Ink?

The Tablet PC provides important benefits beyond enabling users to check boxes and fill out forms. The two biggest advantages are 1) all handwritten notes can be stored electronically and later searched by content, and 2) hand-drawn figures can be quickly added to Word documents and PowerPoint slides to clarify or extend them in new ways.

The first of these—the ability to make notes and have all scribbles faithfully preserved—is an important benefit that can be easily underestimated. Consider for example how much data is lost because data can only be entered in a standard PC in the form of text, and by way of a keyboard. Rough diagrams, brainstorming sessions, design plans are all awkward or impossible to enter via keyboard—yet they represent the most common way in which people think: through pictures and visual representations, rather than with sequential text. Even with written notes, how they are arranged on the screen matters to the act of brainstorming or reacting or developing plans—yet even with a mouse, placing keyboard text at an arbitrary point in a document is nearly impossible. True, you can always scan notes and other nontext documents, but this tedious, and it's still hard to tie things together. Contrast this with the ease of simply writing something directly onto the screen of a Tablet PC.

The second point—the ability to enter hand-drawn diagrams into Office documents—is a significant benefit that cannot be re-created by any other means. Its importance will increase as groupware and workflow processes become more widespread. When these technologies see broader use, the limitations of current text-oriented approaches to editing and redacting will become even more painfully evident. When many commentators are involved, the ability to use copy editing symbols, to circle text, to comment, draw diagrams, insert arrows, and so forth, is infinitely easier than the wooden add/delete markings available today in word processors. Existing mark-up mechanisms are significantly limiting when more than two commentators insert edits into the same document. And only a Tablet PC today makes the use of pictorial and diagrammatic annotations practical.

See using Microsoft "OneNote" over a network (hard wired or wireless) to create a shared white board for simultaneous group collaboration by all connected users - Link!