Chapter 6. Microsoft Office and the Office XP Pack for Tablet PC
The Microsoft Office XP Pack for Tablet PC, or Tablet Pack, adds support for using ink directly in certain Microsoft Office XP applications (Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, and Microsoft Outlook 2002). The Tablet Pack adds three new features to Office. The first, and most significant, is the ink drawing and writing area, which allows writing and drawing within certain Office documents. The second is a change to the slide show shortcut menu in PowerPoint, which provides pen tools during slide shows. The third is a set of information conduits to exchange information between Windows Journal and Outlook. In a sense, the Tablet Pack is a glimpse into the future, demonstrating how applications written with tablet users in mind will incorporate ink-enabled features. The Tablet Pack itself is an interim solution, and other Office applications such as Microsoft Access, Microsoft Visio, and Microsoft FrontPage are not enhanced by the Tablet Pack. Future versions of Office and other major applications will provide tablet-enabled features as part of the applications themselves. Someday you may be able to use your pen to annotate a document directly in Word as easily as you can when you import it into Journal. A piece of this future is available today with the Tablet Pack.
When I sent out an e-mail announcement for a technical writer using a handwritten annotation at the top of the job announcement, the response I got was incredible. People who weren’t even applying for the job wrote back to me to tell me how it was the coolest announcement they had ever seen. —Suzanne Sowinska, Tablet PC Team
Note
Installing the Tablet Pack is strictly optional. Using your pen instead of a mouse and using Input Panel, you have full control over all Office applications. You can still insert ink into any Office document by drawing it in Journal, copying it, and pasting it into the document.
Download and Installation
The Tablet Pack is available as a free download from Microsoft. The U.S. English version is available at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=9132&clcid=0x409
Once the Tablet Pack installer is downloaded, close all Office applications and Journal and double-tap the installer program. The installer will open and guide you through the installation process. The only installation options are the location of the Help files and the link to the video demonstrating the features of the Tablet Pack, as shown in Figure 6-1.
Tablet Pack Help is accessible from the Help menu of Office applications enhanced by the Tablet Pack. The Tablet Pack demo will open by default after the Tablet Pack is installed. If you don’t want to view the demo, you can uncheck the Start The Tablet Pack Tutorial check box on the last installer screen.
Note
Tablet Pack Help is not integrated into the main Help system for Office, so it will not be included in searches you conduct using the regular Help or the Office Assistant.
Note
In addition to the Tablet Pack, you may need to add speech recognition to your Office applications for full tablet integration. Sometimes this feature is installed when Office is installed, and sometimes it is not. If when opening an Office document you are prompted to install speech recognition, insert your Office CD, and let the installer add these files. If you don’t have access to your Office CD at that moment, you can postpone it, but every time you open a file that uses speech recognition, you will be asked about installation again.
The Ink Drawing and Writing Area
While the details of using ink vary between Office applications enhanced by the Tablet Pack, the tool that unites them is the ink drawing and writing area or just ink area. Writing and drawing in an ink area are fairly intuitive and do not require much explanation to use at a basic level. However, if you want full utility out of ink areas and want to avoid some potential frustrations, a little background understanding really helps. The ink area is an object. Objects are items other than text that you insert into your Office documents. Photos, clip art, sound files, even graphs from Excel are all objects. (If you want to see how many different kinds of objects are available in an Office application, select the Object command on the Insert menu and count them. My version of Word lists 29 different objects I could insert.) This distinction is important because text and objects are always separate. You can use only the pen to write or draw inside the border of an ink area. You cannot write, highlight, or draw on top of text and you cannot type text inside the border of an ink area. The concept of an object is also key for changing the format of an ink area. As we will see later in this chapter, the Format Object command is central for making the most of ink in Office.
The objects most people are familiar with are pictures. An ink area is actually similar to a picture in that you may resize it, drag it to a new position in the document, change the way text flows around it, group it with other objects, and in some cases add a border and fill color. Unlike a picture, you can write, draw, select, edit, and erase inside ink areas using pen tools similar to what you find in Journal. Figure 6-2 shows what an ink area looks like in Word.
Glossary
An ink area is a rectangular object in an Office application enhanced by the Tablet Pack, where you can write, draw, select, edit, and erase using pen tools.
To insert an ink area into an Office application enhanced by the Tablet Pack, tap once to place the cursor where you want the ink area to appear and either tap the Insert Ink Drawing And Writing
button on the Standard toolbar or select Ink Drawing And Writing from the Insert menu. A blank ink area appears with a floating Ink toolbar of pen tools as shown in Figure 6-3. Once you have drawn what you want inside the ink area, tapping anywhere outside the ink area border will deselect it. The blue hash-mark border will disappear, but the ink will remain as part of your document. To open and edit any ink area, tap the ink area once, and the blue border will reappear.
Note
There is no option to undo inserting an ink area. To remove an ink area, you must select and cut or delete it.
Pens and Highlighters
The ink area provides six basic pens, three ball point and three felt tip, each available in three different colors, and three highlighters. All the pens have round tips, but the felt tip pens are slightly wider and are pressure sensitive if your tablet supports that feature. To switch pens, tap the triangle next to the Pen button on the Ink toolbar, select a new pen from the list, and then start writing anywhere inside the boundaries of the ink area. As with Journal, highlighters let the underlying ink show through, but the color of the ink may shift, and the different highlight colors will mix where they touch.
You can create a custom pen width and color while using any of the six pens, but unlike the five user-defined pens in Journal, the changes are only temporary. If you’re writing with a black felt-tip pen on an ink area and you change the color to green and the tip to six points wide, your pen will become a green marker. The pen will remain a green marker until you either customize the pen again or go back to using any of the six predefined pens or three highlighters. Once you reselect a predefined pen, your custom pen settings are discarded. Creating a custom pen in one Office application affects all the ink areas in that application but doesn’t affect other Office applications. For example, if you create a green ballpoint pen in Word, every ink area in every document you have open will have a green ballpoint pen available, but ink areas in Outlook will not.
Custom pens inherit the properties of whatever pen was selected, so to create a custom highlighter you must start with a predefined highlighter. It doesn’t matter which color you choose, however, because this is easily changed. Once you have selected the type of pen you want, choose a new color by tapping the triangle next to the Ink Color button on the Ink toolbar and make your selection from the list. To choose a new pen width, tap the Ink Style button on the Ink toolbar and make your selection from the list. Select any of the predefined pens when you are finished with the custom pen.
Note
The Ink Color button is used to change the pen color. Although the Ink Color button has a paintbrush icon on it, you can’t use this tool for drawing on the ink area.
Note
The width of the predefined highlighter is wider than the maximum custom pen width of six points. If you make a custom highlighter, do not change the pen width unless you want a very narrow highlighter. Once you customize the highlighter width, six points is as wide as you can go until you reselect a predefined highlighter.
Erasing and Selecting
All erasing is done with the eraser tool. The eraser is always a stroke eraser. The stroke eraser allows for fast erasing, especially if you write in script in which the entire word is a single stroke, but you cannot touch up your strokes with the eraser as you can in Journal. There is no scratch-out gesture in an ink area, but there is a top-of-pen erase if your pen has that feature and the feature is enabled.
Caution
There is no undo when editing ink on a ink area. If you delete or significantly change your ink, it is permanent.
The ink area Selection Tool is a marquee-type tool, rather than the lasso-type tool used in Journal. The difference is that a marquee selection is rectangular and is created by starting in one corner of the area you want selected and dragging the marquee until it contains the desired ink. Figure 6-4 shows the difference with selecting using the two selection tools. The marquee selection limits your precision when it comes to selecting specific ink strokes, but two special selection techniques can help. When you write words on an ink area, the ink strokes are grouped into words, just as they are in Journal. The marquee will select the word only if it encloses more than 50 percent of the ink strokes that make up the word. This allows you some leeway in getting only the text you desire. The second technique is to tap with Selection Tool to select a single ink stroke instead of dragging a marquee around it. Once you have ink selected, you can move, resize, cut and paste it, or change its color and width.
Note
Even though ink strokes are grouped into words, there is no handwriting recognition of ink in ink areas The words in an ink area are not included when you search an Office document for specific text using the Find command.
Selecting Ink and Ink Areas
One of the keys for power use of ink areas is understanding that there are three kinds of selections for your writing and drawings: ink selection, ink area selection, and object selection. With ink selection, you use the Selection Tool to select some or all of the ink inside the ink area. Once selected, this ink can be moved, resized, copied, or cut. With ink area selection, you tap the border of an ink area or tap inside on a spot free of ink. This selects the ink area without selecting the ink it contains. This lets you make the ink area larger when you need more room to draw or smaller so that it takes up less space in your document without changing the ink. (If you resize it smaller than the area occupied by ink, some of the ink will appear cropped.) With object selection, you tap or right-tap the blue border of an ink area you have already selected, and the border will change to a solid black line. You have now selected the ink area as an object. Resizing the ink area now will change the ink area and all the ink it contains. Selecting an ink area as an object is also required to adjust the border and layout for an ink area. Table 6-1 shows what each selection looks like and the effect of resizing.
Try This
This concept of three kinds of selection is much clearer once you do it yourself. Open a new Word document, and insert an ink area. Write a few words inside, and then try selecting and resizing the ink and ink area to get each of the effects shown in Table 6-1.
Copy and Paste with Ink Areas
The results of copying and pasting using ink areas are also very dependent on exactly what you have selected, both when you copy and when you paste. If you select an entire ink area in one Office document, copy it, and then paste it in a different location or into a different Office document, it will insert as an ink area that you can continue to edit. It doesn’t matter whether you selected it as an ink area or as an object, so long as you selected the whole thing. If you select the ink in an ink area, instead of the ink area itself, it gets trickier. Taking selected ink from one ink area and putting it in another ink area is a three-step process.
Select and copy the desired ink.
Insert a new ink area into the document or select an existing ink area where you want the ink pasted.
Paste the ink into the ink area.
If you leave out step two and simply paste the ink into an Office document, without inserting a new or selecting an existing ink area, the ink will be converted into a picture. Once the ink becomes a picture, you can no longer edit it with pen tools. Pictures, however, offer far more formatting options than ink areas. Pictures can be made transparent and rotated, as shown in Figure 6-5. They are also easier to combine with other Office-drawn objects such as auto shapes and flow charts. This is where understanding the ins and out of ink areas pays off. As you work with ink in various Office applications, you can choose the format, ink or picture, that best meets your needs in each situation.
Tip
If you paste ink as a picture, keep the original ink in a document somewhere until you are certain you have no more edits. It’s really annoying to re-create ink to correct one tiny mistake.
Copying and pasting between an ink area and Journal requires attention as well. If you are copying ink from Journal to an Office application, the same rules apply as when copying from an ink area. If you copy ink from Journal and paste it onto an ink area, it remains ink. If you copy ink from Journal and paste it directly into an Office application, it becomes a picture. Going the other direction (from Office applications to Journal), the rules are almost reversed. If you select the ink in an ink area, copy it, and paste it directly into Journal, it inserts as ink. If you select an entire ink area, however, and paste the ink area into Journal, it becomes a picture.
Tip
If you have a fairly complex drawing you want placed in an ink area, create the drawing in Journal where you have better tools. Once the drawing is complete, select, copy, and paste it into an ink area or directly into the Office document as a picture.
Paste Link
One very cool feature of ink areas is that they support Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). This means you can keep a master version of the ink area and then use the Paste Link command to copy that into other ink areas in other Office applications. For example, you might have a diagram you are developing in a Word document that you would like to use in a PowerPoint presentation. If you use the Paste Link command to bring the Word ink area into PowerPoint, then any changes you make in Word are automatically changed in PowerPoint.
Glossary
Object Linking and Embedding, or OLE, is a system for copying an object from one file—including text, ink drawing and writing, pictures, tables, and others—and pasting it into another file so that changes in the source appear automatically in the target. To use OLE, you must choose Paste Link from the Edit menu rather than the conventional Paste command.
To paste link an ink area, first select it as an object rather than as an ink area and choose the Copy command. Next place your cursor in the document where you want to paste the picture, but do not insert an ink area. Select Paste Special from the Edit menu, and choose Paste Link As An Ink Drawing And Writing Object, as shown in Figure 6-6.
The copied picture will appear exactly as it does in the first document. You can move and resize the linked copy, but you can edit the picture only in the original document. Once you save the new document, the complete picture is included, so you do not need the original to view the copy. However, each time you open the document containing the linked copy, you will see a dialog box, like the one shown in Figure 6-7, asking whether you want to update the link to the original. If the original is not available, the link cannot be updated.
Note
Linked objects may not offer all format options such as transparency or rotation.
Compatibility with Other Versions of Office
The Tablet Pack works only with Office XP, so if you are using an older version of Office on your tablet, you must upgrade to take advantage of the Tablet Pack. The Tablet Pack also works correctly only under Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, so you cannot install it on a non-tablet computer running Office XP and use the features with a mouse instead of a pen.
The good news is that any documents you create that include ink areas are readable by Office XP without the Tablet Pack installed and older versions of Office for both Windows and the Macintosh. These users will see ink areas as pictures with all the color and formatting intact. They cannot edit the ink areas, but they can select, move, and print them. One caveat to this statement involves Outlook e-mail. When a message is forwarded, the ink area is converted to a placeholder that says “<<object>>”. See the section "Using the Tablet Pack with Outlook" later in this chapter for more information.
Using the Tablet Pack with Word
The fundamentals of inserting and using an ink area are the same in Office applications enhanced by the Tablet Pack. The primary differences are how the ink area appears in the document and the options for formatting. When you insert an ink area in Word, it will expand out to the margins of the page and slightly more than half that distance high, with a solid white background and no border. It will also be in line with the text, so if you insert or remove text, the ink area will move to stay at the same place in your narrative. In most cases, these settings work fine. If you need a more complex layout, you can adjust the appearance of the ink area using the Format Object command.
Here’s an example of how you might reformat an ink area in Word to integrate more smoothly with the text layout:
Insert a new ink area where you want it in the document.
Draw in the ink area and resize it as necessary.
Format the ink area by selecting it and choosing Object from the Format menu or choosing Format Object from the shortcut menu. In this case, the layout is changed to put the ink area behind the text so that text can be formatted around the ink drawing.
Reformat the paragraphs to flow around the text. (Alternatively, you can define boundaries on the drawing for text to flow around.)
Save the final product.
Changing the layout of the ink area so that it is no longer in line opens up several options, including putting colored borders around the ink area; grouping the ink area with other ink areas, pictures, or objects; and arranging which objects appear on top of others. In Figure 6-8, the picture and the ink area are set to a square layout so that they can be placed next to each other on the page and are being grouped into a single object using the Group command on the Drawing toolbar. As a group, these objects will stay together as the document is edited. The ink area also has a border around it to separate it from the text and make it easier to read.
Tip
If the Drawing toolbar isn’t visible, open it manually by selecting Drawing from the Toolbar submenu on the View menu.
No matter how you format an ink area, you cannot make the fill color transparent. This can make mixing pictures, text, and ink areas difficult when the ink area is behind text and pictures because whenever you select the ink area to draw, the surrounding text and pictures disappear. Drawing ink on top of pictures is best done in Journal and pasted into Word as a picture. As shown back in Figure 6-5, pictures have more formatting flexibility than ink areas anyway.
Try This
Next time you need to create an invitation to a party or a function, try creating it in Word with clip art and a map drawn with the pen, as well as using typed text. Try creating the same invitation in Journal and compare the two. You’ll probably find that manipulating ink and pictures was easier with Journal but adding and editing typed text was easier with Word. Once you have a better feel for each application, you can pick the one that best meets your needs for a particular job.
Ink in Word Comments
The Tablet Pack also lets you use ink in Word comments. This is a phenomenal feature if you are reviewing a Word document and don’t have a keyboard available. Inserting an ink comment is done the same way as inserting a typed comment or voice comment. Select the point in the text where you want the comment to appear or select the block of text you are commenting on, and choose Ink Comment from the Insert menu or choose New Ink Comment from the Reviewing toolbar as shown in Figure 6-9.
An ink comment is actually just a shortcut for opening a normal comment and then inserting an ink area, so the same pen tools will appear. Write your comment, expanding or reducing the ink area as needed, and when you are done, tap anywhere outside the borders of the ink area. Since the ink comment is simply a comment window containing an ink area, you can mix ink and text in a comment by typing your text and then drawing in the ink area. Figure 6-10 shows how an ink comment, a typed comment, and a mixed comment appear in the document margin in Word.
The bubble comments in the margin are a new feature in Word 2002. In previous versions of Word, comments were marked by a small footnote in the text but appeared in a separate window called the Comments pane. People viewing your ink comments with older versions of Office will see them in the Comments pane as pictures, as shown in Figure 6-11.
Using the Tablet Pack with Excel
Ink areas in Excel are actually simpler than in Word and appear to the right of whichever cell you have selected. They are always free-floating elements, so after you create one, you can drag it to any location on your spreadsheet. As you add or remove cells, the ink area will move to remain in approximately the same position relative to adjacent cells. Excel ink areas are also transparent by default, so they will not obscure cells in your spreadsheet. The disadvantage of the transparency is that the ink strokes do not look as smooth. Figure 6-12 shows an ink area on an Excel spreadsheet. The “Total Due” cells are actually under the ink area. The transparent ink area is still in front of the cells in your spreadsheet, so if you try to tap a cell to edit its contents you will select the ink area instead. To get to cells under the ink area, you must use the arrow keys on Input Panel or on a standard keyboard or temporarily drag the ink area out of the way.
Note
While an ink area is selected and you are writing on it, it will have an opaque, white background. Once you tap outside the border, it will become transparent again.
Formatting Options in Excel
If you want a border or background on your ink area in Excel, select the ink area as an object by either tapping the border twice or right-tapping the border and choose Format Object just as you did in Word. In the Format Object dialog box shown in Figure 6-13, use the Colors And Lines tab to select a fill color for a background and a line color for a border. If you create a border, you must also select a line style or weight. The default line weight is zero points, so if you only choose a color nothing will appear.
The Format Object dialog box also controls how the ink area will respond as you insert, delete, and reformat cells. By default, ink areas move as you insert and delete cells, but they will not change size if you change the width of columns or rows. If you have an ink area that needs to stay in one place or an ink area where ink areas must remain aligned with specific cells, you can change this behavior on the Properties tab. Dramatic resizing can seriously reduce the readability of your ink, as shown in Figure 6-14.
If you password-protect your worksheet so that others can see the contents but cannot make changes, all of your ink areas are protected as well. The Protection tab in the Format Object dialog box lets you unprotect specific ink areas without unprotecting the spreadsheet cells. This lets users edit only existing ink areas, however, and not add new ones. If you want to protect your spreadsheet but let users edit and add ink areas, customize the protection to exclude objects. To customize protection, select Protection from the Tools menu and then select Protect Sheet. In the Protect Sheet dialog box, scroll down in the list of allowable actions and check Edit Objects, as shown in Figure 6-15. This is a nifty trick to let other tablet users use ink to comment on your spreadsheet without changing the spreadsheet itself.
Note
You cannot insert an ink area into an Excel comment as you can into a Word comment.
Using the Tablet Pack with PowerPoint
While creating slides in PowerPoint has always been easy, the Tablet Pack adds a whole new dimension. Now you can create slides by simply drawing them with the pen or by mixing ink areas with typed titles and pictures. Creating a slide with your pen is very useful when you are away from your office and need to make a new slide quickly, without the support of an art department or stock images. These slides also create a very different feel for your presentations, as demonstrated by Figure 6-16. Depending on your audience, you may choose slides containing your handwriting and drawings strictly for the effect.
Creating a slide with one large ink area, as in Figure 6-16, is pretty simple. Insert an ink area onto a blank slide, resize it to fill the slide, and start drawing. Mixing text, pictures, and ink takes a little more planning. Suppose you had a picture that you wanted to annotate with hand-drawn text. If you create one ink area, even if it is behind the picture it will obscure the picture whenever you draw. Instead, create multiple ink areas for the individual elements, as shown in Figure 6-17. This not only allows you to see what you’re doing, but also allows you to use custom animations in each ink area separately rather than having them all appear at once.
As in Word, you can add a border to an ink area in PowerPoint, but it always has solid white backgrounds. Because of this, you many need to use the Order commands on the Drawing toolbar or shortcut menu to bring pictures to the front of ink areas if they are getting cut off. Once you have the order perfect, protect the order by selecting all the objects and grouping them.
For even more control over your ink in PowerPoint, select the ink on the ink area, copy it, deselect the ink area, and then paste the ink into the presentation without inserting a new ink area. Just as with Word, this converts the ink into a picture that you can rotate and make transparent but can no longer edit.
Save as Picture
If you create a great slide that you want to convert into a picture, you can save the entire slide as an Enhanced Windows Metafile as was demonstrated in Chapter 4 for creating a Journal template. You can also save just some of the ink and other objects on a slide as a picture by selecting them, right-tapping on the selection, and selecting Save As Picture from the shortcut menu. This trick is handy if you want to use the ease of layout in PowerPoint to create a picture you will later use in Word. It’s also helpful to use your slide or drawing in an application that isn’t a part of Office.
Try This
Add your signature to a letter you create in Word by inserting an ink area and signing. Next sign your name in a PowerPoint ink area, and save the signature as a metafile picture. Insert the picture into your Word letter where you would normally sign. Both methods allow you to sign the letter, but the second technique saves you the trouble of creating a new ink area in every letter you create and works when you’re using a keyboard and mouse instead of the pen. As an interesting side note, there’s no legal precedent as to whether an ink signature is considered a legal signature or not. Given the ease of signing on the tablet, this may come up in the next few years.
Using Ink During Presentations
Marking up a slide with ink before a presentation is cool, but far more visually powerful is drawing on the slide during the presentation itself. This Tablet Pack feature offers an enormous increase in presentation interactivity. It works by adding several pen tools to the slide show shortcut menu available during a presentation. The full slide show shortcut menu is shown in Figure 6-18.
By default, the slide show shortcut menu can be displayed during a presentation by right-tapping or by tapping the slide show shortcut menu button. The display options for the slide show shortcut menu are controlled by selecting Options from the Tools menu and selecting the View tab, as shown in Figure 6-19.
Both ways of displaying the slide show shortcut menu are on by default. Some people prefer having only the slide show shortcut menu button so that they cannot accidentally open the shortcut menu by resting their pen on the screen too long. Other people find the slide show shortcut menu button distracting and prefer having it disabled.
When you select any of the pen tools, the entire screen becomes a transparent writing ink area. You must tap once with the pen somewhere on the screen before you can start writing or drawing. Once you do this, you can draw on any part of the slide you want. As shown in Figure 6-20, this lets you draw directly on pictures, something you cannot do with a normal ink area. While the pen tool is active, a simplified Ink toolbar is visible that allows you to change the ink color or return to the slide show by tapping the Arrow button. You must tap the Arrow button to return PowerPoint to normal operation or to change drawing tools. This takes a bit of practice, so be sure to try it out by yourself before using it in a presentation.
Tip
Ensure that the Input Panel gesture to make Input Panel appear is turned off before using the pen tools during a presentation. If it isn’t, Input Panel is likely to appear suddenly as you move your pen back and forth over the screen. The Input Panel gesture settings are available in the Tablet And Pen Settings control panel.
Saving Your Ink Annotations
When you finish marking up a slide, you can either erase all the ink with the Erase All Ink On Slide command from the slide show shortcut menu or leave it on the slide and return to the slide show. If you leave it on the slide, it will still be there if you return to the slide later in the presentation. If you end the slide show and there is still ink on any of your slides, you will be asked whether you want the ink to become a permanent part of your presentation, as shown in Figure 6-21. If you answer No, the ink will disappear. If you answer Yes, the ink will be converted into new, transparent ink areas.
Tip
If your audience members also have tablets, consider giving them a copy of your presentation beforehand and letting them take personal notes directly on their own slides.
While saving your ink annotations is a great feature, there are a couple of things to keep in mind if you use it:
Transparent ink areas have more jagged ink. If you save the ink and then view the show again, the ink will not appear as smooth as when you first drew it.
Saved ink becomes part of the slide and cannot be edited or erased with pen tools during subsequent presentations.
If the jagged ink doesn’t bother you, the save ink feature is a great workaround to create a transparent ink area that simply isn’t an option when you author a slide. Build the slide with all the elements except the ink, view the show, add the additional ink you want, and save it.
Using the Tablet Pack with Outlook
During field trials of the tablet, one of the most positive responses people had was in how it allowed them to use their e-mail. One aspect of this was how comfortable and easy it was to quickly review and delete messages while waiting in an airport or sitting on the couch. The other component was how much people enjoyed jotting off a quick message in their own handwriting. Ink in e-mail creates a much more human, more informal effect and lets you include handwriting and drawings in your messages.
“There is an emotional reaction when people discover ink e-mail.” —Cynthia Tee, Tablet PC Team
For ink e-mail to work easily, you must use Word as your e-mail editor. While this is usually the default setting, you can check this setting in Outlook by selecting Options from the Tools menu. On the Mail Format tab, the Use Microsoft Word To Edit E-Mail Messages check box should be checked, as shown in Figure 6-22.
Since you are using Word to edit the e-mail, inserting an ink area into an e-mail message is identical to inserting ink into a Word document. Tap anywhere in the body of a new message, insert an ink area, and start drawing. When the recipient sees your e-mail, the ink will appear as an image inserted into your message. Most modern e-mail readers handle this quite well, but some do not. If you don’t know whether the recipient uses an e-mail program that supports pictures, such as Outlook or Outlook Express, it’s usually a good idea to include a short typed sentence asking them to tell you if they didn’t see the handwritten part of the message. It’s also a good idea not to use complex formatting of ink objects in an e-mail. It might look cool before you send it, but results are somewhat unpredictable. As shown in Figure 6-23, you can use ink in replies as well as in new messages When a message containing ink is forwarded or replied to, the ink may or may not remain visible. The ink area might appear as the text “<<object>>” in further messages. If your message is more important than a quick and informal note, you might want to type it rather than write it in ink.
Tip
If you just want to put a small bit of ink, such as a smiling face, into an e-mail that you are typing or writing with Input Panel, you can do it without inserting an ink area. Draw it on the Input Panel writing pad, and then send it as ink to your e-mail.
If you do not want to use Word as your e-mail editor, you can still insert an ink area into your messages. First go to the Mail Format tab on the Options dialog box, and uncheck the settings to use Word as your e-mail editor. While you are there, change the Compose In This Message Format drop-down list to Rich Text. Tap in the body of a new message where you want the ink to go, and select Object from the Insert menu. The Insert Object dialog box, shown in Figure 6-24, lists all the objects that Office can create. Select the Ink Drawing And Writing object type, and tap OK. The ink area will appear in the body of the message.
Messages must be in rich text format for the Insert Object command to be available. This becomes an issue when someone sends you a message in one of the other two common e-mail formats, HTML and plain text. Since Outlook replies in the same format the message was sent, the Insert Object command will not be an option unless you change the format of your message to rich text. With Word as your e-mail editor, you can insert ink in messages of any format; however, only rich text and HTML e-mails support pictures. If you try to send a reply containing ink in plain text format, you will be given the option of converting the message to HTML or discarding your ink pictures, as shown in Figure 6-25.
You can insert ink areas in e-mail messages, and you can also insert ink areas in other Outlook items, such as tasks, appointments, contacts, journal entries, and meeting requests. In fact, the only place you can’t put an ink area in Outlook is in a note. Keeping a handwritten message or drawing, such as a map, together with its corresponding appointment or task in Outlook is a great feature. Figure 6-26 shows a ink area in an Outlook task.
Note
You have to tap an ink area only once to edit it in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. To edit an ink area in an Outlook item, you must tap it twice. The exception is ink areas in e-mail messages if you are using Word as your e-mail editor.
Using the Tablet Pack with Journal
Tablet Pack adds a few features to Journal that let you convert handwriting directly to Outlook items. After Tablet Pack is installed, the Convert Selection To E-mail option on the Actions menu is replaced by a Convert Selection To command with a submenu. The submenu contains the e-mail option and adds options to create new appointments, contacts, or tasks using your handwriting, as shown in Figure 6-27.
The new convert functions provide a quick way for you to take those details and to-dos you jot down in your notes and put them into your daily organizer so that they actually get done. To create the new Outlook item, first select the handwriting you want converted and choose the target Outlook item from the Actions menu. The Convert Selection To commands are also available directly from the shortcut menu if you enabled Show Extended Shortcut Menus in Journal Options, as shown in Figure 6-28.
Note
Outlook does not need to be running for the Convert Selection To commands to work.
When you select a Convert Selection To command, a Convert dialog box appears with the converted text, as shown in Figure 6-29. You can correct any errors in the converted text while still viewing the original ink. An alternative list of words is also available.
Once the text is correct and you tap Convert, a new Outlook item will open. If the item is an appointment or a contact, the text appears in the body section so that you can select and drag the appropriate information into the appropriate fields. If it is a task, the converted text goes directly into the subject field. Figure 6-30 shows the converted text in an Outlook contact.
Because tasks have the text put directly into the subject field, the text won’t appear correctly if the original handwriting covers two lines. If this happens, tap the Options button on the Convert dialog box and uncheck Preserve Line Breaks From Notes. All the task text now appears on one line. This is especially useful when you employ some creative lasso work to select exactly the text you want inserted into Outlook, as shown in Figure 6-31.
Inserting Meeting Information from Outlook
Tablet Pack lets Journal take meeting information from Outlook and insert it into a Journal note. This is a quick way to add the date, time, place, people, and subject of a meeting right into your notes for future reference. To add the meeting information, select Outlook Meeting Information from the Insert menu in Journal. When the Insert Meeting Information dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 6-32, select the date and the meeting and tap OK.
The meeting information appears in a new text box in your note as shown in Figure 6-33.
Tip
If you save your new note after inserting the meeting information and before writing anything, the filename for the new note will be the word “Subject” plus the subject of your meeting. You may want to position the text box so that the “Subject” line is in the note title area of the note for clarity as well.
Key Points
Tablet Pack lets you add ink directly into Word 2002, Excel 2002, PowerPoint 2002, and Outlook 2002 in ink areas.
Tablet Pack works only with Office XP on a tablet, but the ink is visible by most versions of Office and most e-mail viewers.
The results of copy and paste and the options for formatting ink areas vary depending on how they are selected.
Ink areas always have solid white backgrounds except in Excel and when created during a PowerPoint slide show.
Pen tools are available during PowerPoint presentations from the slide show shortcut menu.
Tablet Pack adds conduits for easier exchange of information between Journal and Outlook.