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Microsocft MVP: Tablet PC
Study Smart With Your Tablet
2 December 2004Posted By: TracyPosted in: Software Info, Study Aids, Tips / Tricks
Now that winter finals are on the way (or already arrived/passed), some people have a dead set way to study, some flounder about hoping they’ll hit the magic combination "some day", while others have a tested box of tricks they pull from every semester or so. Since you’ve probably had your tablet for no more than two years, you probably are still on the lookout for new ways to use your tablet to break the monotony of studying (because using a cool tablet sure beats studying hunched over a book for hours). Hopefully some of these tips will prove useful!
Fair warning: if you’re one who gets distracted easily, you might want to disable your WiFi. It’s tempting to surf the net instead of studying if you don’t (trust me). Also, if you are wanting to study your books on the tablet, you only have a week or so to study, they aren’t digital already, and it’s more than a couple chapters, it’s likely to not be worth the trouble to get them scanned for that purpose only. Even the fastest students have reported a weekend of scanning to get their books digital (Kinko’s doesn’t cut it since they won’t scan books), and that’s time you probably could have finished most of your studying with anyway.
1. Studying Digital Books/Handouts
OneNote / Journal / GoBinder - All three programs have the same general idea: use your existing notes program to import papers or entire books to annotate and store as you desire. Also, if you’ve OCR‘d the pages, GoBinder and OneNote have a search function which can be handy a times (NOTE: both programs can search your handwritten notes as well). The downfall to these programs are you have to get the pages into the program some way, which can be time consuming if you’re in a hurry. If you plan on using this method, I suggest importing right after you scan the pages when you aren’t quite as busy.
PDF Readers - You can either scan to PDF or print images to PDF (say, if you’ve taken digital pictures as your input method). Anyway, no matter how you get your pages to PDF, any PDF reader makes for a nice read (it’s their job, after all). Adobe Reader 6.0 Adobe Acrobat 6.0 has ink handling (but it’s terribly expensive. Hopefully Adobe will get with the picture and add ink to Reader soon…) for those who like to mark up as they read (be aware there are other readers out there other than Adobe though). NOTE: I personally like using Adobe Reader because it has a nice full screen viewer which makes for extra real estate and clearer pictures. Reader doesn’t allow markup, but it’s good for viewing.
Image Viewers - While not often thought of, if you just have a bunch of scanned images and you want to view them quick and pain free (and no frills), any image viewer will do the job. Window Picture and Fax Viewer, DIMIN Viewer, and many others can take care of the job. Just to note: select the first image you want to view if you open your pictures as displayed to the left. If you highlight a couple, or just click randomly, it won’t start at the beginning and it’s difficult to find the start. Also, make sure your scans are sequential for this reason (this applies to printing to PDF, as it’s the worst to start over just because everything’s out of order).
Office XP / 2003 - If you like Word it’s the most familiar to you, there’s always the option to import a scan, document, or image. While Office XP has an add in for ink annotations, I really like how Office 2003 has ink integrated from the get-go. 
2. Way to play the Flash Card game
PowerPoint - While at first glance PowerPoint may seem limited since you have a slide order to follow, just a quick change opens up possibilities. Tushar Mehta has a free add in which allows for a random slide show, making for perfect flash cards. Just create blank slides, insert whatever you’d like (the ink annotations is a great tool in PowerPoint 2003 as well), and run the random slide show to use the flash cards. A neat thing about this is you can use the ink in presentation mode to write the answers on the cards as you go, then when you’re done, just "don’t save" the annotations. Simple, and my favorite since it requires no extra software. Just make sure you turn you Macro security settings to medium so you can enable the add in.
abletFlash - This program is a "concept" program which is a flash card game for French, Chemistry and SAT. I haven’t actually used it because those subjects are not ones I personally take, but if you have the need, make sure to at least check it out.
TabletFlash - I’ve actually used this program and it works great with tablets (which is good, since it’s "Tablet" Flash). It’s simple and easy, not bulky, and lets you focus on learning the cards instead of the program. (Thanks for the tip coolkid!)
Pauker Flash Card Learning - This program, again, is a free flash card program. It seems to cover everything you could want with a flash card, except I’m not thinking it has ink support so that would likely be a downfall for the tablet user. However, other features look like they would easily make up for the lack of inking. 
SuperMemo ($39) -If you want to call this program a flash card program go ahead, but I would call it, "How to learn everything." A bit of an overkill if you just need to learn oxidation numbers on the fly, but for the long haul, this would be a nice program to get familiar with (if you’re into this kind of thing, of course). It pretty much does everything: flash cards with HTML support, can use mind maps from MindManager, organize your subject, track your learning/forgetting curve, separate into subsets to study, and lot more. While not really tablet specific, it’s definitely worth a mention if you like structured learning. (Thanks Andy Lin!!!)
3. Miscellaneous tips to help your study efforts
Cool Ruler - If you find yourself in class or studying and suddenly need a ruler yet only have your tablet, never fear! This free program will put a digital ruler on your screen which you can re-size, move around, scale, put place marks, and make horizontal or vertical. It can measure in pixels, centimeter, or inches (they just thought of everything, didn’t they). There’s also a protractor for angles (because when can you ever find your protractor when you need it).
All that studying in front of a computer screen deserves the best picture possible. Make sure you run ClearTweak for ClearType tuner to make your letters as easy to read as possible. There’s no software needed to use it, however there is the option to run it off a download instead of the Internet.
If you don’t fully appreciate the standard Windows calculator you do have several options as a tablet user (lucky you ^_^). First, there’s Microsoft Calculator for Tablet PC (a PowerToy), which lets you write in your numbers, punch some buttons, and you’re on your way. The only problem is when it has trouble recognizing your handwriting and you get weird results…
A second option is Texas Instruments Virtual-TI, which emulates a real life TI (as the name implies). Works nice with a tablet and it’s free. OK, almost free, since you have to first own the real life calculator you want to emulate (and yes, it can emulate all the way up to TI-92 Plus) ^_^.
Option three is either xThink MathJournal($98) or xThink Calculator($44). Both aren’t free, and MathJournal’s pretty pricey, but it has it’s reasons. Pretty much, you write the equation, it solves it for you (the link explains this much better with more pictures). MathJournal will even do three-dimensional graphs (way cool, see below) and much much more. If you’re a math/science major, this would be very neat to have. No need for a TI-89 with this baby.
HOLIDAY NOTICE: xThink has a sale on both MathJournal and Calculator for 33% off until the end of 2004. Act fast because that makes MathJournal only $66 (which is probably cheaper than that TI-89 you picked up).
<–(MathJournal)
That’s all for now, folks. Enjoy your studying, go off and ace your finals, and Happy Holidays!
(As always, if you have a study tip you’d like to share, please leave a comment and I’d be more than happy to look in to it :-D)
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December 3rd, 2004 at 7:45 am
wow, This post is great! I don’t like abletflash because I can’t add my own Cards. I use “Tablet flash”. you can find it somewhere in tabletpost.com
December 3rd, 2004 at 8:32 am
xThink has a Holiday sale. 33% off, so student copy of MathJournal is $66 until end of the year.
December 3rd, 2004 at 9:45 am
You should also take a look into Supermemo, which is an extremely powerful flash card-esque program. There is no specific ink-support for it though.
December 3rd, 2004 at 10:11 am
Thanks guys! I updated the post to include the ideas! This is exactly what this site needs (your comments) ^_^
December 4th, 2004 at 8:15 am
Hey, what a great site! I hope we can use this to make the Tablet much more useful for all of us. A piece of software that is not so tablety but is still very useful from a mathematical point of view is GraphCalc. You’ll find it at Sourceforge.net or just by going to Google. It doesn’t have the best tablet interface, but hey it’s free and it gets the job done beautifully. The only thing I wish I could do with it that I cannot is program it. If anybody comes across a good program for this, let me know.
December 5th, 2004 at 2:09 am
You wrote Adobe Reader 6.0 has updated ink handling. I wish it had. But where is it? I know that abletfactory is working on a little program for annotating pdfs and there is PDF Annotator (which won’t be for free) from GRAHL software design, a runner up on the Ink 2004 contest. However I would like Acrobat Reader to do the job (maybe Acrobat 7 can (coming soon)).
December 5th, 2004 at 12:50 pm
Bastian - Thanks for noticing that. My mistake, it’s Acrobat 6.0 which has ink handling and it’s way overpriced for student uses. I would be happy if Reader had inking too
Here’s a thread on TabletPCBuzz.com which discusses inking on PDF’s for all who are interested: http://tabletpcbuzz.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=9630
December 7th, 2004 at 9:37 pm
Hello does anybody know if publishing companies offer to sell pdf college text books? It would be great to have all of my text books on my tablet so that I don’t have to carry them around. My other alternative is to scan them then turn them into a big pdf file, but thats a pain in the a$$. Does anybody have any suggestions?
December 8th, 2004 at 6:14 am
hey TJ. lets go into business together making backup copies of textbooks for people via scanning and taking digital pictures. 50/50
December 8th, 2004 at 11:29 am
TJ, not on a large scale, but some do offer the PDF version of the book online or in different ways. You just have to look. It’s not quite so popular yet, and the companies are afraid of people burning CD’s of their books and selling/giving them to others without turning any profit over. I think it’s fine for someone to make a copy of a book they bought and own, just like ripping MP3’s of you own CD’s, but the legal issue pops up as soon as you make multiple copies of those songs for other people who don’t own the books, especially if you sell them. I don’t think that’s a great business venture, Mike, because that may get you in trouble, but way to think on your toes, lol.
July 4th, 2007 at 10:26 am
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August 3rd, 2007 at 7:14 am
Digital books are almost free now.